


Degrees of Possession

by ilyahna1980



Category: Dragon Age (Video Games), Dragon Age II
Genre: Angst, Complicated Relationships, Demons, Dysfunctional Relationships, F/M, Forgiveness, Love, Mage-Templar War, Mental Instability, Redemption, Relationship(s), Revolution, Self-Discovery, Sexual Content, The Fade, Violence, War
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-03-27
Updated: 2015-07-24
Packaged: 2018-03-19 21:39:33
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 11
Words: 36,675
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3625170
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ilyahna1980/pseuds/ilyahna1980
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He was like a flame, and she a moth that liked the way it felt to burn.</p><p>Hawke is nineteen when she meets Anders, ten years her senior, but they are both rebels with a cause. Her's is her family and the needy, and her weapons are blades and conviction. His is the plight of mages, with magic and revolution. In the end, however, their undeniable passion for each other threatens them both, body and soul, and everything they believe in. Anders is her first love, and may be her last, for more than one reason. NSFW.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Chapter incorporates a suggestion that Nine Inch Nails "Closer" was good behind the bedroom door inspiration for these two. Or three if you count Justice.
> 
> The tenor of this story is in progress, and will cement itself as I go. It began as a one-shot but has morphed into something longer and more complex. Notes regarding Anders to follow in later chapters.

“Alright,” Hawke said. “Hit me.”

“Bets on Varric,” Fenris laughed, reaching around Hawke from behind, grabbing a bottle of wine. He had leaned down far enough for his chest to press against her back, much closer than he needed to be.

Without missing a beat, she grabbed the bottle of wine, clamping Fenris' hand to it. She brought it to her lips and took a healthy sip, keeping the elf pinned behind her. He chuckled softly, a low sound in her ear, and snaked one hand under the table, out of view of the others, and slid it between her legs. Hawke's eyes shut half-way as he touched her, and the wine she swallowed passed a half grin at his forwardness. Then she let go of the bottle and his hand, and elbowed Fenris in the stomach. He grunted, air fluttering the hair on her neck, amusement in the tone, and removed himself with the bottle of wine.

A card flew across the table and landed in front of her and she grabbed it, turning it over into her hand. Damn. Not the one she needed. Nevertheless, she picked up a copper and tossed it into the pile in the center of the table.

“Call,” she said and glanced up for the first time since the interaction with Fenris.

Immediately, she caught his eyes on her. Anders. He was across the table, slouched in a chair with his long legs stretched out beneath the table, hands interlaced over his hips. The mage professed the stakes too high to play in their weekly game of Wicked Grace, but tonight he'd come to observe. Guessing from his expression, Hawke's recent bet had not been the only thing he'd seen. Golden, feline eyes were narrowed, one corner of his lips turned down. When she met his gaze, he held it for long seconds before one eyebrow lifted slowly.

Hawke bit down on the inside of her cheek, annoyed at the way she felt her eyes soften, and the way she felt guilty. It occurred to her that she couldn't remember a night after mid-week Wicked Grace, for months, that she hadn't shared Fenris' bed. Of course, Anders would not know that. It was only yesterday that he had kissed her for the first time, an impulsive moment in his clinic that had led to a rather unbridled, mostly sleepless night. There had been a conversation afterward about bad ideas, and not doing it again. After which they'd done it again.

“Hawke! Quit making puppy-eyes at Blondie and throw down!” Varric took a roll from the basket at his side and hurled it at her. Hawke flinched as it scored her in the shoulder, and she caught it and tossed it back, aiming for the head. She was glad for the distraction, because it covered the heat in her cheeks.. Marian Hawke did not blush. Impulsively, she picked up a silver coin and slapped it down in the center of the table.

“I raise,” she snarled, ignoring the smirk on Anders' lips.

“Bullshit,” Varric said, brows up. “You have squat.”

Isabela chimed in, cards dropping to the table in a defeated flutter. “Too rich for my blood.”

Hawke fluttered her fingers at Varric. “You and me, dwarf.” She grinned, showing him teeth.

“Fuck me,” Varric said, grabbing a silver and tossing it. Wicked Grace almost always turned into a battle of  wits between the two of them, each master bluffers, and they traded small fortunes on a weekly basis. “Let's see 'em.”

Hawke spread her cards before her, picking up a dram of whiskey and tossing it back. “Wardens over griffons,” she sneered.

Varric issued a long growl, and tossed his five cards on the table. “Two Seekers. Damnit, Hawke.”

“Back to the Deep Roads with you, brother.” She leaned forward and made a show of scooping the pile of coins toward her. It felt good to have the upper hand.

Isabela giggled, standing up with three empty mugs in one hand. “I'm getting refills,” she said, edging down the table, along the wall. She stopped behind Anders’ chair, leaning over with an arm circling his shoulders. She rubbed his chest, her cleavage pressing against the back of his head. “Don't you want something?” she purred. “Ale? Whiskey? I've got whatever you need, darlin'.”

Anders' eyes widened, his lips open. “Um...” he managed briefly. “I … ale, I guess.”

Isabela grinned and patted his chest. “You got it, honey.” She straightened at the same moment that a copper coin hurtled across the table and thunked into her cheek, hard. She squeaked, hand covering the spot as she stared in surprise.

“There's a tip,” Hawke growled at her.

“Damn, bitch,” she said, one lip curling up. “So that's how it is this week, huh?”

Before Hawke could respond, Isabela flounced away, taking two more mugs with her.

Why had she just done that? Was she actually jealous? She caught Varric staring at her, face openly curious and lit with humor. Hawke just scowled at him, and busied herself stacking coins, continuing to ignore Anders' gaze, even though she felt it in every pore. She had cleaned house with that hand, which meant that the game was at an end. Fenris was notoriously terrible at cards, having no end of facial tells, despite having a demeanor itself kin to stone. There were a few decent players at the Hanged Man that sometimes cycled in, but tonight, it was just them. 

She began picking up cards, straightening them carefully. Her reaction to Isabela employing her wiles on Anders unsettled her. All she had done was sleep with him. She and Fenris had slept together more than once, and Isabela flirted with him shamelessly, which had never bothered her..

Hawke snatched the bottle of whiskey and upended it, filling a glass, and shoved it across the table to the mage, roughly enough that part of it sloshed out. “Drink.”

Anders hesitated for a moment, elegant fingers only touching the glass, and not picking it up.

“What's wrong, can't hold your liquor?” It was Fenris that asked, smirking at Anders from the end of the table, where he sat with his boots propped on the edge.

The mage's lips twisted, and Hawke knew why he was reluctant. Lowered inhibitions were a recipe for disaster when one had a spirit of Justice to keep a lid on. He glanced up at Hawke then, who speared him with a level stare, one eyebrow raised, and then he snatched the glass off the table and downed it. Wincing at the acrid concoction, he set it down heavily, shoving it toward her with the ends of his fingers, eyes expectant. Hawke grinned at him and refilled it 

Taking a drink from the bottle herself, she relaxed as Anders struggled with the second shot, and she began to feel as though she was back in control. Slumping down in her chair with the bottle in her hand, she stretched her legs out and pushed one boot off by the heel. She found Anders' calf with the side of her foot, slipping up along the inside muscle. His eyes went round over the glass at his lips, and it perched there, his mouth open without drinking as Hawke's toes caressed his inner thigh. All the while, she watched him like a bird of prey, drinking him in: the flush that suffused his cheeks, the dark stubble outlining the chiseled jaw, the blonde hair that would never stay tamed, falling over his forehead. She edged her touch fully between his legs then, and he covered his soft gasp by draining the whiskey, shoving one hand under the table to grab her foot. He closed his fingers around it, squeezing hard. It prevented her from moving, but he didn't shove her away immediately. Setting the empty glass down on the table again, he held her gaze with a mixture of exasperation and open want.

Isabela chose that instant to return, interrupting their moment, and Anders shoved her foot away, sitting up straight in his chair to avoid her. The pirate thonked a ceramic mug on the table in front of Anders, glanced at Hawke with a demure smile, and squeezed the mage's shoulder in a brief massage. This time, Hawke ignored her.

 

The evening drew on, with Anders cajoled into several more shots, until he was laughing and trading stories with Varric and jabs with Fenris. It was a nice change from his usual doom and gloom, and Hawke thought it suited him. By the time Varric called it in for the night, she was on the other side of sober, and had stood to say her goodbyes to the dwarf with one boot on.

Varric took one glance at her state of disrepair, and shook his head, flashing her a look of amusement that depreciated into concern.

“You sure a possessed apostate mage is a good idea?”

“Mind your own business Varric,” she warned him, though she didn't manage to sound truly irritable.

The dwarf snorted. “Because that's my strong point.” He frowned. “Just be careful, Hawke.”

“Careful is no fun.”

“Definitely not,” another voice said, and Hawke felt a familiar form against her back, arms circling her waist. Fenris, his scent steel and leather and blood. His chin rested on her shoulder, lips just flush with the skin of her neck without touching.

Varric looked at the elf for a moment, then shook his head. Turning away and moving for the door, he muttered something, of which Hawke only heard “damned bizarre triangle.”

Fenris clung to her, his thumbs slipping below her belt and holding her to him. “Coming home with me?” he asked.

There was no denying the way the tattooed warrior put fire in her blood, but there was also no denying something else. Something glaring and new. “Fen, I ...” she began, but was jostled forward suddenly as he jerked away, cursing.

“What the fuck?” he growled, and Hawke turned to see him glaring at Anders, rubbing his side. The mage only regarded him a with large, innocent eyes, handing Hawke her missing boot. Fenris' eyes narrowed, and he shoved his way past Hawke, coming between the two of them. The elf paused for a brief moment in front of Anders, sneering, then he was moving toward the door.

“If you get bored, Hawke...” he said, and he was gone.

Anders held his hand aloft before her, and smiled slyly as electricity shimmered over his fingers, there and then gone.

Laughter escaped her lips, despite the fine line Anders trod by provoking an elf that despised mages in such a flippant way. Instead of voicing that, however, she just asked: “What else can you do with that?” and he dissolved into laughter.

 

-ooo-

  


They managed to stumble through the doorway rather than walk through it. Anders tried to hold it open for her while she tried to hold it open for him. He dropped her keys and tried to pick them up at the same time that she took his invitation to go through into the house. Colliding with his shoulder, he caught her with both arms around her legs, and they were both giggling.

Hawke clung to the door frame while her shoulders heaved with silly laughter, feeling those same vibrations from Anders as he held her calves against his chest. The humor relaxed gradually from their systems, and Anders struggled to stand upright, using Hawke for balance. It began naturally, as he unfolded his long legs from the ground, but when he had not let go of her halfway up, it became something else. His fingers trailed along the backs of her thighs, pausing for a moment, and then caressing the contours of her rear as he pulled her close to him. The rife sensation of amusement was replaced in a flush of her cheeks by intense want that stabbed into her upper belly, and she found a low groan of desire on her lips before she could check it. Anders heard it, and his lips registered a small smile, content, and he slid his hands up her back. The touch was gentle, a massage of fingertips, and he leaned down to brush his lips against hers. Not a kiss, but a question. As if he needed to ask.

Hawke found his face with both hands, pressing his lips to hers. Surprised, perhaps, by the passion behind that gesture, he took a moment to relinquish himself to it. When he did, it was fully, around an exhalation of air while his arms tightened around her. The playful brush of lips became a passionate expression of need, his tongue hot against hers, just as his skin was flushed beneath her fingers. For a moment, there was only the sound of broken breathing through noses, and the moist, soft sound of lips and tongues.

Finally, Hawke dropped a hand from his face and pushed him back, even though her lips followed his in a staccato of kisses until he was far enough away that she would have had to lean fully into it. Her left hand rested now on his waist, and she could feel the heat radiating from him. It carried his scent, so animal like in the moment, redolent with cloves, candle smoke, dust, sweat, and that nameless thing that was just him. Anders dropped his head, sliding his cheek along hers, until his mouth found the pulse at her throat. He traced it with his lips, so slowly, and Hawke felt his heartbeat at her breast.

With a small sound that was a bit snarl and some muted passion, she drew away, turning her face so that she could feel the breeze from Hightown. Her heart was thudding erratically against her chest, and she imagined her skin was on fire. A feeling of intense insecurity settled over everything else.

“Anders,” she said, her voice throaty. “Didn't we decide last night that …” she looked at him, her resolve wavering. “...we shouldn't?” Why was she being cautious?

Anders returned her gaze, and for a moment, that same caution was written on his features, but his eyes were bright with lust and liquor, and the expression dissolved into that feline smile. He shifted closer to her again, touching his forehead, nose to hers. “You want me to go?” he teased, knowing the answer.

Her heart thudded like it did after fighting, after killing. It was primal, her desire for him, and it was not just an urge for his body, but a need to possess him. Instead of answering him, she took his upper arms in both hands, and pushed him back, across the threshold. They were in the great room of the mansion, and her fingers were on his throat, his on her waist, his tongue in her mouth, when Hawke realized they were not alone.

She broke their kiss, hands leaving his throat to rest on his chest as his arms circled her, realization coming slower to him. Her two dwarven residents, Bodahn and Sandal, stood side by side near the table stretching along the east wall. Bodahn stared at them, mouth agape, but Sandal grinned.

“Enchantment?”

Hawke burst into laughter, muscles so recently tensed in passion relaxing, quivering against the man that held her.

“My lady,” Bodahn said, blinking slowly.

“Bodahn,” Hawke said, slipping her hands down Anders' chest, turning him at the hip as she stepped past him, taking his hand to pull him behind her. “We were just … going to bed.”

Anders made a sound that was part laughter, part surprise as she jerked him roughly after her. He came,  tugged up the stairs, her pace slowing only when the reached the second landing. This was where they'd been the night before, only he'd slipped in during the midnight hours with the key she'd given him to the cellar. They'd talked before the fire, and he'd admitted things. Longings. Talked about the last three years, and that he'd ached for her. She hadn't told him that she shared that. That she had lain awake at night wanting him so much it knotted muscles.

She led him into her room, and without being told, he toed the door shut with a slam that betrayed his impatience. He pulled her to him with the fingers still in hers, burying his lips in her hair, tracing the bones of her cheek, touching her jaw.

“My whole existence is flawed,” he whispered, suddenly serious, breath hot against her ear, tongue touching it gently, hot. “But you...”

Hawke moved into him, pressing his back against the door. Her hands were on his face, the rasp of stubble beneath her palms, then they were in his hair, tugging the leather tie loose. It fell away, framing his face and taking years from him. She pushed her fingers through it, seeking his tongue with her own.  Then he wrapped his arms around and pulled her roughly against him, his desire for her hard against her belly. Lips still against hers, he half-whispered, half-moaned the words “Help me get away from myself.”

She said nothing, but her fingers tangled at his belt, deftly navigating the knots until it fell loose in her hands. Instead of dropping it to floor, she wrapped her arms around him again, shamelessly tracing his contours, lips touching the exposed chest just below his throat. He shivered, and for brief second, there was a flash of blue white in her otherwise dark room. Her eyes tracked his face, and the spiderweb of light bled through his skin, pulsing, and faded. He sighed, raggedly, “Hawke...”

Her hands caressed his forearms, soothing, distracting, all the while twisting the silk cord of his belt over in her fingers so that in one deft movement she was able to circle his wrists, winding them around and jerking it tight. The action brought a sharp gasp from him, part surprise and part anger and part animal desire. His chest rose as he instinctively pulled at the binding on his wrists, but Hawke held them firmly. A low growl issued from his throat, and that iridescent blue flame crackled over him, surging through his veins into his face, his eyes, and he turned his face away as his eyes burned.  He was gritting his teeth against it, and Hawke leaned into him, touching the cords of his neck that stood out.

“Anders...” she whispered, just a sound to reflect her passion. Her hands unlaced his breeches, and he was hard in her fingers. She traced the outline of him as his back remained pressed against the door,  his hands bound behind him. He tilted his head back, a deep rumble of desire in his chest, eyes closed, but he let her have her way, submissive. She left him that way, removing his pants beneath those feathered robes. He obliged her by kicking his boots away, and she slid down, fingers on his belly, his hips, as her mouth found him and took him in. He gasped in pleasure, remaining dutifully bound at the door, but she felt his muscles quake, wanting to rid himself of the binding, and the blue fire crackled over him. Justice did not like being bound, even if Anders did.

“Marian...” he sighed. “Please...”

Her fingers caressed the insides of his thighs, cupping him, stroking his hard length, mouth taking him in. Her tongue traced the outline of him, from the base to the tip, circling it and extracting a deep groan.  Again, his wrists jerked against the binding, and the blue fire surged through him, hotter. Something frustrated, full of desire, and angry issued from behind gritted teeth, even as his hips rocked toward her, pressing himself into her mouth.

He came, the taste of him sweetness and salt on her tongue, and she uncoiled from the floor, sliding along his body, bound against the door. As she did, his chest heaved as he struggled for breath, and jerking movements beneath blue flame found his hands freed. They were on her in a moment, and electricity shot through her, touching every sensitive place in her body. He was in control then, and she let him be.

He pushed her back, colliding roughly with the bed, crackling all the while with blue white lightning that faded in and out. Who was this? Anders? Justice? He had her on her back, clothes off, jerking her legs up to his sides, thrusting into her. It was a shock-wave of pleasure. He held that connection, not moving, for a moment, and she savored the feel of him. They fit together perfectly, as though designed that way. Then he moved inside her, every stroke colliding with a bundle of nerves and need.

They'd made love the night before. It had been a sweet thing where they'd discovered each other. Tonight, Hawke felt something else, and she pulled him into her with the pressure of her legs. His labored breathing dissolved into a gasp of passion, and she felt her hips thrust upward into his, those elegant fingers on her upper thighs. He pulled her into him, and she pushed herself into him. His climax began as a low growl in his chest, and it spun out of him in crackle of electricity, turning her nerves into points of fire - painful and sweet alike. They collapsed together, panting, coated in sweat, hearts beating in unison. Hawke couldn't help comparing this moment to the so recent ones in Fenris' bed. He set her nerves alight, but never her heart. Anders burned her to her core.

  
She loved him.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter is relatively tame - though the rating will stay Explicit because later chapters will not be. I also have my own take on the relationship timeline. My Hawke is no where near as easily moved as the game Hawke. Things will be said when they fit with the story.

The first night Anders had spent with her had not felt like he'd actually “spent the night” as they did not really sleep. It had been late already when he came to her – after midnight, and they'd only dozed off, exhausted, for a short time near dawn. Anders had woken before her, coaxing her only far enough out of sleep to whisper goodbye, as he had patients to attend at his clinic. 

This morning, however, Hawke woke entangled with him, vulnerable with skin upon skin, her thigh between his legs, head on his chest, his arms around her. His head was turned toward her so that his lips were pressed against her hair, his steady breathing warm. She found herself frozen, both wanting to flee and to stay that way indefinitely. It was the latter feeling that she struggled with. She did not know how to be close to people. Ever since her brother had died, she had felt as though she had less control, as though things were always balanced on a knife edge, and if she was not hyper-vigilant, she would lose her sister, her mother, Varric. It was much easier to keep that circle small, her options for failure limited.

She studied her hand where it lay across him, the black paint on her nails chipped, and she resisted the urge to caress his bare flesh. How could she invite someone else into her life? There was a reason she'd avoided it, having taken his warning for the last three years. It had nothing to do with Justice, with him breaking her heart, or any of the other flimsy excuses he gave her. She'd stayed away because Hawke would do anything for her family, for those she cared for, and some voice in the back of her mind told her that this man would push that to the limit.

It was easier, with Fenris. He was good company, especially with a bottle of wine in his bloodstream, and he didn't need anything from her. Their weekly trysts had no strings attached, no emotions, and the elf could take care of himself. Hawke wondered briefly, watching Anders breathe, if last night would have happened if she hadn't been several sheets to the wind. Then she sighed. That was a poor excuse. She'd been completely sober that first night. 

With one finger, she traced the contour of his torso, over his belly to the soft, blonde hair barely visible on his chest. Remembering the way the spirit within him had fought him for control, Hawke smirked and wondered what her thing was for men that glowed blue in the dark. Even as the thought made her shake with silent laughter, she knew Anders' struggle with Justice was not funny. There were parts of the night before that he'd told her he didn't remember, which disturbed Hawke on both their parts.

Her finger came to rest at his throat, where there was a thin brown cord. There was a charm on it she'd not noticed before, as it has always been dark when they were together. She picked it up and slid it closer to her, examining it. It was an onyx relief of a bird. An eagle? Then it struck her: not an eagle – a hawk.

She was staring at it, unsure how to feel, when his fingers closed over hers, covering the charm. Surprised, she looked up, and found him watching her. His blonde hair was in disarray, partly covering one eye.

“That was my secret,” he said quietly, but there was a smile in his voice.

“How long have you had it?” Hawke raised an eyebrow at him, gave him a teasing grin.

Anders shrugged. “Oh... just a little while. Maybe... three years.” 

“ _Three years?_ ” 

He frowned and let go of her hand, taking the bird with him. Holding it up in the sunlight that filtered through the open balcony door, he examined it. “A patient gave it to me. Just after I met you. I thought it was … uncanny timing.”

Hawke felt her teasing grin shaping into something tender. Deft fingers plucked the charm from him. “And how long have you worn it?”

Now Anders looked sheepish. “Maybe...three years?” he muttered, then glanced at her out of the corner of his eye.

Hawke burst into laughter, because it covered how she really felt about that. Twisting the leather thong around her finger, she tightened it around his neck, tugging gently. He took her meaning and bent his head to meet her lips. Anders had admitted readily enough that he'd wanted her for years, but Hawke had convinced herself that he meant physically – which seemed supported by recent experience. This thing, close to his heart, spoke of something deeper. A slow burn.

The mage broke their kiss then, long enough to untangle himself from her and roll onto his side, facing her. She still held the charm at her chest now, fingers refusing to release it of their own accord. She wanted to ask him  _why_ . What did it mean to him?

His eyes were only inches from hers, warm and golden brown. He touched his forehead to hers, brushing her nose with his own. One hand slipped under the quilt and found her hip, slid softly around to her lower back. He looked like he wanted to say something, gaze intent, so Hawke spoke first.

“Waking up with you here is strange.” She regretted it immediately, as a look of mild hurt crossed his face.

“Should I sneak out in cover of darkness from now on?” he asked.

“From now on?” Hawke raised an eyebrow, meaning it to question his motives. Was he another Fenris, with whom she had never shared a dawn?

Anders seemed not to take the question that way, however. He leaned away from her, his free hand raking the hair out of his face. “Marian...” he said. “Is this … just sex? Or...”he trailed off, the gaze that held hers serious.

Hawke looked away, to the hand that still curled around his necklace. Distractedly, she released it, laying it carefully against him, where it fell to rest on his inner arm. “If it is?”

His fingers had been massaging the muscles of her back, and now they stilled. “Then I'm not interested,” he said simply.

_Let him go, Hawke. This is a sinking ship. It's not too late._

But that wasn't true. It  _was_ too late. It had been too late the first time he kissed her.

“It's not just about sex, Anders,” she said quietly, but didn't look at him. He said nothing, and for a moment did not move, and then the hand on her back shifted to her hip, and he rolled her to her back, and then he was on top, on his knees, his hands sliding up her arms as they pressed them back over her head, coming to rest at her wrists, which he pinned to the bed. Hawke let him hold her down as he bent his head close to hers, his long hair brushing her face.

“Tell me what it's about, then,” he demanded, immobilizing her lower body with his leg muscles. The quilt had slipped from his back, leaving him naked in the sunlight. Hawke's eyes trailed over his lean form, focusing on anything but his face.

His fingers tightened on her wrists, his thumbnails hard against her flesh. He leaned closer, touching her neck with his lips, following the curve of her throat to her ear. He caressed the lobe with his tongue, gently, then he bit down, eliciting a sound of pain and pleasure from her. Then he whispered in her ear, voice dark with arousal.

“Tell me.”

Hawke had no intention of being the first to admit anything. She let her body go limp, not speaking, and when he moved again to see her face, he relaxed his hold on her wrists, and with lightning reflexes, she twisted out of his grip. One hand clutched his left arm and pulled it, upsetting his balance, which she followed through by digging her fingers into his opposite side, where he was ticklish. With a grunt of surprise and amusement, she toppled him to the side and straddled him the same fluid motion. Before he could react, she had his wrists, pinned above his head. Grinning like a wolf, she leaned down, her black hair shadowing her face.

“No. You tell me.”

Anders was laughing, eyes dancing. “For a minute I forgot you overpower people for a living.” Then he closed his fingers over hers and a jolt of cold shocked her – not painful, but surprising enough that she let go with an indignant exclamation. He sat upright, pushing her back, and she was in his lap. He folded his arms around her, holding her close, and his mouth was on hers. She wrapped her legs about him, her arms circling his neck, and applied herself to the kiss, holding him to her with her fingers in his hair. More than just a part of her wanted him to be distracted, to forget about this business of saying things that didn't need to be said.

He was not to be swayed, however, even by a naked woman in his arms. He pulled away from her at last, hands leaving her back. He pushed them through her hair, exposing her eyes. Anders held her that way, looking at her, for a long moment, then he slowly stroked one cheek with the backs of his fingers.

When he spoke, his voice was wistful, low. “I have loved you from the very beginning,” he said. “From that first day in my clinic. I saw a kindred soul - someone that would let nothing get in her way.” His serious tone changed, a glint in his eye. “It helped that you're disgustingly gorgeous.”

Hawke laughed. “ _Disgustingly_ gorgeous? How does that work?”

“It's not really fair to other women,” he answered. “Sad, really.”

Shaking her head, she touched his face, rough with dark stubble, trailing her fingers down his neck, coming to rest on his chest. “Does that line actually work?” She said it mockingly, but she was pleased at the compliment. Hawke considered herself thoroughly unladylike; certainly her sister Bethany and her mother had long ago fallen into despair at her boyish haircut and her preference for armor over dresses. She wasn't sure if anyone had ever told her she was pleasing to look at.

“Line?” Anders pouted. “I don't have _lines_.”

Hawke snorted, raising her eyebrow at him. “Oh I think you can be properly suave when you mean to.”

He chuckled, pressing his lips to her nose. “You, my darling, are avoiding my question.” Leaning back and taking in her expression, recognition touched his features. “You're scared,” he said, tone a mix of wonder and pity.

Hawke's brows came down over her nose. “I am not scared,” she lied.

Anders' lips curved into a half smile. “Liar,” he whispered.

She frowned at him, eyes narrow. “Is this the part where you promise not to hurt me? Promise not to get yourself killed? Or captured by Templars?”

At that, he looked guilty, turning away. “You know I can't.”

Hawke watched him, and she decided that he knew what he was asking, wanting her to love him. And he had tried to push her away, had tried to keep her safe, all the while harboring those same feelings for her. All that time, he'd fought the good fight at her side, never asking anything of her 

“Oh well,” she said, the words an impulse. “It's a good thing I like dangerous.”

He turned back sharply, searching her face. A ghost of a smile, hopeful, played on his lips. “That,” he said, “I'm pretty sure I can promise you no end of.”

Hawke smirked. “I guessed as much.”

Then he was serious again. “But I would drown us both in blood to keep you safe.”

“That is surpassing romantic, Anders.”

He shrugged. “I mean it.” He brushed her hair back again with one hand. “I love you.” His eyes met hers, and Hawke recognized the expectation there, the desire he had to hear the same words, but she couldn't make her lips move. It was a cliff, beyond which there was a plummet into the vast unknown. Anders seemed to read her reticence, and didn't push her.

Instead, he changed the topic. “Speaking of danger, you asked about what I did with the mage underground?”

She raised an eyebrow, relief mixing with guilt. What was wrong with her? He was a bomb with a short fuse. There might not be a  _later_ to tell him she loved him.

He went on. “Tonight, we are going to help a woman escape the Circle. If you want to help me. But … I should warn you. It's the kind of thing we've killed for in the past.”

“Killed who?”

His expression was unapologetic. “Anyone who gets in our way that we can't otherwise inspire to disengage.”

“So, Templars.”

Anders shrugged. “I understand if you don't want that on your head. We'll be getting them to the docks. You can just meet us in Lowtown if you don't want to deal with the Circle.”

Hawke was surprised by that. “You're actually going  _in?_ They've been looking for you for years, and you're just going to … walk in to the lion's den?”

“It's a risk I'm willing to take. If you don't want to be involved...”

Hawke cut him off with fingers over his lips, giving him a grin full of teeth.

“Violating the Circle of Magi, smuggling out a mage, risk of imprisonment and death, and otherwise sticking it to authority? I wouldn't miss it.”

Anders' lips curved into a smile beneath her fingers. Then he sank backward into the down mattress, pulling her with him, and was done speaking.

 


	3. Chapter 3

 

Hawke occupied the corner shadows, content for a moment only to watch the object of her affectionate obsession. She was outside his clinic, the dilapidated and oppressing stone of Darktown little more than a sewer, replete with garbage both literal and figurative, the cast away and lost of a sick city. It was rife, redolent with rot - the unwashed, organic stench of the decay of downtrodden humanity. Occasionally, someone would pass beneath the overhang of the tomb he had claimed for himself, catching her eyes with a dead stare, one with the implied threat of apathy, for here, people had nothing more to lose.  It was here, free of the bonds of the Circle, that Anders nevertheless smoldered in a prison with bars of obscurity and injustice, a fire to stoke the well of rebellion beneath his surface, one day to erupt. To burn things down around him. 

Those hands so capable of destruction were now applied gently to the ministration of healing, and the soft, distant set of his eyes belied the steel beneath. She had seen the duplicity he harbored within moments of meeting him, one side not being a shell for the other, not smoke and mirrors to hide the reality of him, but two genuinely opposed natures. Caretaker and despoiler, physician and executioner, with righteousness the seeds of both. He had restored a life and threatened hers in same few breaths, perceiving her at their first meeting as a challenge to the curative atmosphere he had striven to foster here. How fluidly he had shifted from one aspect of himself to the other, a hand so recently engaged in lifting malaise from a young patient then turned toward her, palm out, voice dark and confident with his challenge.

There was another dichotomy intrinsic to him, one more sinister and sad. Long years of his sporadic company upon the road, of veiled flirtation, led to glimpses of some other self, some vestige of a man with a sparkling wit, a dry, playful humor that enjoyed tugging strings, affecting in some ways to seem innocent even though Hawke knew him to be anything but. It was Justice, she thought, that had suppressed that free spirit, the creature whose love of life would not allow him to be trammeled before, who would now kill for the principle of liberty.  

It was in many of these places that Marian Hawke bisected with the apostate mage. They neither of them would be caged, by convention or societal boundaries. Their principles, within which they were both firmly entrenched, were personal constructs, born of lives led moving always away from expectations and standards of behavior. They each masked feeling with humor, burying expression in sarcasm or brooding silence. Anders had killed to protect his freedom, and to offer it to other mages trapped in the past he had escaped; Hawke had first wet a blade in the chest of a Templar who had the unfortunate revelation that her sister was mage-born.

 _Anders' eyes had softened at that tale, for she'd been only twelve._ He'd offered her a secret in exchange, one by which he appeared equal parts amused and disgusted, from the murk of his advent as a Gray Warden. Solein Surana, the arcane Hero of Ferelden of whom he spoke with a gleaming reverence bordering on infatuation, had first come upon a younger Anders at Vigil's Keep.He had been surrounded by corpses of Darkspawn and the smoldering bodies of the Templars charged with returning him to the Circle Tower. He had told the woman then that he had not done it, and Hawke could well imagine that now rare smile and sparkling eyes dripping with youthful inculpability; she knew Anders was not above bald-faced lies if they served his purpose. It was the fact that the Warden Commander had expressed a passive disbelief in this claim, accompanied by a subsequent taciturn dismissal that seemed to fuel Anders' appreciation of his fellow mage: she'd believed he had killed the Templars, and didn't care, and then had ripped him from their clutches by conscripting him into the Gray Wardens. His secret, Anders told her, was that he  _had_  killed them. 

Hawke detached herself at last from the gloom outside his clinic, stepping through the entryway. Anders was engaged fully in his task, both hands hovering over the chest of a young woman lying prone upon the narrow table at the center of the room. A pallid green vapor pulsed between them, sapped from his patient, who coughed with a wracking, wet report. Hawke regarded him, his forehead creased in concentration, eyes half-lidded, and thought that the dark humor he displayed at eradicating his captors was insulation for contrition. Perhaps not for the ultimate act of defiance, but for the necessity of it. They had pushed him too far, in the end: years of abuse, the torture of a year of solitary confinement. He was a man first wrought by the circumstance visited upon him, and then defined by his own hand. 

The woman, the room's only other occupant now, coughed again and shuddered, opening her eyes. Anders bent toward her, one hand now brushing back the damp blonde hair from a pale forehead. He spoke, but Hawke could not hear his words. The woman nodded and replied, offering the mage a weak smile, which he returned more brightly. He gave her an arm to assist her in rising, and she clung to it overlong, muttering something with an imploring expression. Anders merely shook his head, patting her hand briefly, and walked with her toward the door. The woman's green eyes, bright with receding fever, blinked at Hawke warily, then she whispered  _'Thank you, messer,'_ to Anders, and faded through the overhang with a single backward glance at the healer. 

He looked at Hawke for the first time then, tiny spiderwebs of exhaustion creasing the corners of his golden eyes. The brown and green feathers of his coat were bent, disarrayed, and dusty, and he had not bothered to secure it fully, so that the rumpled shirt beneath was visible. Blonde hair, with its hint of rust darkening in the dim light of the clinic, had come loose from the thong that bound it, and fell over his forehead. 

A thin smirk touched his mouth. "Stalking me from the shadows, my love?" He reached for her, fingers closing on the belt at her hips, drawing her to him slowly. 

"I must be losing my touch," Hawke muttered into his chest as he closed his arms around her shoulders. 

She felt his lips shape into a smile, pressed into her tousled black hair. "Hardly. You are simply a siren." His voice was soft with affection, and the heat of his body against hers lulled her into drowsiness. It had been almost three days since, standing just here in his clinic, he had first kissed her, and they had kept each other absorbed and awake in a possessive whirlwind of need and desire that sought desperately to make up for the years they had lost. 

"Are you sure you want to do this?" He brushed his fingers through her hair, overlong nails tickling her scalp. 

Hawke looked up with narrow question in her eyes at the unexpected query, mired in her reflections and believing he meant this tenuous new thing between them. Whatever it was. The gaze that met hers held a more immediate curiosity, however. 

"Someone has to keep you out of trouble," she smirked wryly, earning a snort of laughter from Anders that vibrated in his shoulders. 

"I think you have the wrong idea, love," he said, but his eyes sparkled. 

Hawke made a non-committal noise. "You're mad, you know." She softened the comment by balancing on her toes to kiss him. She meant it to merely graze his lips, but Anders leaned into the contact hungrily, his hand curling into her hair. His other hand was still at her belt, thumb tucked into it at her hip, with two fingers having found their way beneath the form fitting leather of her cuirass, holding her tightly to him. The passion in his body language was as intense as that first touch days ago, and it stole her breath just as forcefully; Anders seemed not to gravitate toward a medium of any sort, giving everything, or nothing. Hawke's response, drawn shakily and starkly from a deep well she had not known resided in her soul, made the world tilt. 

_Help me defy the Chantry, Hawke. Put your life in danger for my cause, Hawke. Love me, and watch me self-destruct._

He was dangerous because she could not tell him no. Did that mean she was bad for him too? 

_How had her hands gotten inside his coat? She didn't even remember unbuttoning it._

He made a low sound of pleasure against her lips when she caressed the skin of his back, and then a throat was clearing behind her in the doorway, and a discordant tremor echoed through Anders' muscles. The moment was shattered, leaving Hawke breathless in the shelter of his arms. The hand in her hair relaxed, smoothing it gently even while holding her to him in what she sensed was a protective posture. She allowed it, willing her heart to slow, cursing it, cheek against his chest where the feathers of his pauldrons tickled her nose.

"Adria," she heard Anders say over her head, rigidly, and then Hawke drew away, turning slowly as his embrace melted from her.

A lone woman stood in the doorway of the clinic, dark red hair curling in no particular order around a heart shaped face. Eyes the color of a low green tide were fixed, unblinking, beyond Hawke. On Anders. Then her gaze shifted to Hawke, skidding over her with a criticism that she did not bother to hide: a raised brow at her haphazard black hair, lips quirking down at the overlong daggers strapped to her back. Adria, such as she was, wore the robes of a mage and a bronze capped wooden staff, their fine quality and style marking her as being from the Kirkwall Circle.

The flat gaze returned to Anders. “We don't need her.”

“She goes.” He didn't bother waiting for the woman to answer, turning away from Hawke and grabbing his staff. Anders clutched it in one hand while fumbling with the buttons of his coat, then pulled a tattered cloak from an iron peg and shrugged into it. He drew the hood up, glancing at Hawke as he did, and giving her a small, secret smile suffused with excitation. Then he was moving, shouldering past his fellow mage, step light with anticipation. With a final glance at Adria, who glowered balefully at the silent rogue, Hawke shrugged, grinned lopsidedly, and followed Anders.

 

* * *

 

It became apparent that the mage underground operated in kind. Adria led them along a path that originated in the sewers, not far from Anders' clinic, and Hawke wondered if the convenient proximity had informed his choice of locale. Abutting a narrow passageway, reached after descending a ladder slick with putrid scum, was an iron door, likewise compromised by the ferment. The corridor beyond was dark as pitch, and Adria conjured a green whisp that left a chemical trail at her shoulder, bathing them all in an otherworldly effulgence.

Hawke brought up the rear, though the arrangement made her uncomfortable. Logically, she knew the corridor had been scouted before – in fact, it was the way Adria had reached Anders' clinic, but with an eye for what was out of place or amiss, she was used to scouting ahead. She found herself wondering if this business would bring them anywhere near Bethany. It still baffled her that her sister expressed little discontent with her lot, and was curious what intrinsic thing was different in Anders' soul. In her own. That contemplation had in part fueled her interest in this venture, as well as a desire to plan for the eventuality that she had to get her sister away from the Circle in a like manner.

They moved in complete silence, for what seemed an hour or more, until at last they reached another ladder, metal rungs rusted and flaking. It stretched into shadow, culminating in a circular opening covered in a metal grate. Adria dismissed the spirit whisp, plunging them again into near total darkness. They gathered in a knot at the bottom of the ladder, as Anders turned his face upward. Only a hint of gloom marked what must have been another room above them, and the mage offered a short, toneless whistle, a broken flutter that might have been any sound.

They waited, and when nothing happened, Anders clutched the ladder and began to climb. He had navigated several rungs when he brushed Hawke's hair with his fingers and then snapped them at her.  _ Come on. _

She followed him after giving him time to distribute his weight higher on the suspect structure. He reached the grate and pushed it up with one hand. It slid aside soundlessly, testament to the fact that this was not the first time they had come this way. Anders disappeared into the room beyond, a darker shadow blotting out the gray murk, and then he held his hand down to her, pulling her up silently behind him.

They were in what appeared to be a storage room, perhaps ten by ten. The culvert was at the center, and the scarce light came from beneath a wooden door in the east corner. Hawke eyed it dubiously, though hearing beyond only silence. She sensed Adria ascend behind them, and flashed Anders a questioning glance. He merely met her eyes, his own glazed with a concentrated focus, and as Adria moved to the door, he released his staff from his back. The mage had accompanied her oft enough into battle that she recognized the set of his shoulders, the angle of his hand on the wood – it was an offensive posture.

Hawke touched his forearm, brows drawn over her nose, and when he turned his metallic gaze on her, she mouthed  _ “What are you doing?”  _ Anders dropped his head and caught her lips very briefly in a kiss, smiling, and whispered in her ear: “ _ Trust me.” _

Adria was opening the door, affecting a disposition of nonchalance. Hawke noticed she'd picked up a small crate that had been positioned by the doorframe. The glint of empty glass winked through the slats, balanced against the mage's hip. She glanced once behind her to Anders, then stepped out into the hall, leaving the door ajar. Anders held Hawke by her wrist, binding her to the shadows, until after a moment the same shapeless whistle echoed down the corridor.

He moved then, tugging her behind him only as far as the awning. He leaned out, cowl still low over his forehead, scanning both sides. Then he slipped out, Hawke in his footsteps. They were in a low-slung passageway, lit with only one oily torch, residue black on the stone wall. Adria had disappeared, but Anders moved with confidence. They rounded a corner, and Hawke saw the other mage passing through another portal at the top of a short rise of well-worn steps. Again, she left the door ajar in her wake.

They were following, the begrimed hem of Anders' cloak trailing over the rise in his wake. Hawke resisted the urge to push him behind her, not caring for his predatory bearing. Anders was many things, but a close quarters fighter he was not – not without calling unwanted attention to them all. No mage was. Reaching the landing, Anders shifted into the gloom of the west corner, listening. Hawke took up the opposite side; the door opened outward, and Adria had left only a crack a hand-span wide.

Then a sound shattered the silence, magnified off the walls. Hawke recognized wood striking stone, glass shattering. Voices raised, tones variant, and she tensed, drawing a dagger from her back soundlessly. Anders met her eyes, grinning.  _ He was enjoying this.  _ Hawke jerked her chin toward the corridor and the sound, but he shook his head, holding up one finger in delay. 

After a moment, the voices depreciated, and he caught her gaze, nodding. She followed him out, slinking along the wall, until they rounded a curvature and found what Hawke immediately recognized as a cleverly staged scenario.

Adria knelt upon the floor with a younger woman, the small crate that held the glass jars spilled upon the flagstone, broken and scattered. Each of them picked at the glass carefully, with Adria stowing it in a fold of her skirt. The younger woman glanced up when she and Anders materialized, her blue eyes pale, frightened orbs. Hawke frowned at the purple bruise on her cheek, diminishing into sickly yellow at the edges. Anders held his hand out to her, and the few pieces of glass she held hit the ground in a soft clatter as she clutched his fingers tightly. Adria did not even look up as Anders pulled the young mage to her feet.

It was at that moment that the only other door in the corridor, perhaps ten feet behind Adria, opened. Anders jerked his charge to the side, flattening them both against the wall, shielding her. Adria looked up, frozen in the gaze of the man whose gaze was turned to her, a lazy grin on his face. He wore the off-duty livery of a Templar, and spoke before he saw them.

“Ade, darlin. When you get done cleaning up this mess, you can find me and ...” he trailed off, seeing Anders at the edge of the torchlight. The Templar's face went white, mouth agape like a fish dragged from the water. Finally, he managed to spurt out: _“You!”_

He drew a dagger from his side, and Hawke sensed a drag in the air from Anders' direction, and with a fractional glance saw he was poised to kill. Hawke reacted like lightening, knowing several things. First, the electricity that crackled about the mage, making her hair rise and skin tingle, would alert every Templar in the vicinity. The second was that she didn't want him to do this. Why, she could not say. It felt wrong.

She danced over the broken shards with deft, silent feet, coming between the Templar and the mages. The man had not seen her immediately, and so her sudden materialization surprised him long enough that he took his eyes off Anders. Hawke's unarrested movement brought her hand to the back of his right elbow, and with her considerable, lithe strength, she jerked him forward, away from the cracked doorway. As his shoulder connected with her sidelong, her other hand bunched in the fabric of the back of his shirt, and she shoved him roughly into the wall. His jowl hit the stone with a wet smack and a grunt of pain as Hawke twisted his arm behind him, immobilizing him. Then the pommel of her blade slammed into his occipital lobe, and he went limp. She eased his slumped form to the ground, replaced her dagger, and eased the door closed.

It had all taken merely seconds.

She turned away from the door and found all three mages staring at her. Raising an eyebrow, she nudged the man with her foot. “We have to get him out of here.” She glanced at Adria. “No mess.”

The woman blanched. Despite what Anders had said about them killing for this task, Hawke sensed their experience with the reality of it might not be as blunt.

They did not argue with her, and moments later, the glass was gathered, shoved to the side in the crate, and they had dragged the unconscious Templar down the hall, shifting him down the stairs, and then into the small storage room where they'd entered.

“Now what?” Adria mumbled, rubbing her arm nervously. Lines creased her pale forehead. 

Hawke met Anders' eyes, nodding toward the open culvert. “You go. I'll follow.”

Anders was holding the young woman by the arm. She had not spoken, and looked, for all practical purposes, completely terrified, her blue eyes wide, white outlining her irises.

“I'm not going without you,” he stated, jaw clenched and brows flat. It was his defiant expression; Hawke knew it well.

“Then climb down. I have to take care of this one.” She toed the unconscious Templar. 

Anders was shaking his head. “Hawke, you ...”

“ _Go_ ,” she snapped. _What part of sneaking about in the Circle invited time to discuss things?_

In the distance, a door slammed, and it got Anders' attention. The girl he clutched gasped in terror, and he pulled her toward the opening in the floor, muttering encouragement to her. She descended quickly, falling the last few rungs with a muffled cry, and then Anders was following her.

Hawke turned to Adria, but before she could speak, the mage tilted her head at the opening. “Do what you're going to do. I have to cover this drain.” 

The rogue didn't argue. Glancing over the lip of the culvert, she saw Anders looking up at her in the dim oval of light. The shadow leeched the color from his face, making of him a charcoal relief, carving darkness into the apprehension written upon his features. “ _Hawke,”_ he hissed, holding out his hand.

Instead of going to him, Hawke leaned down and tucked her hands under the arms of the unconscious Templar, and she pulled him toward the opening, stepping over the lip so that could angle his legs down.

“ _What are you doing?”_ Anders called up in a strained half-whisper that devolved into a sharp curse as Hawke let the body go. It toppled into the opening and fell the seven or so feet to the ground with a muffled thump. Without a glance at Adria, Hawke followed, simply dropping through the culvert, hands catching the lip of the drain and swinging her down in a crouch beside the Templar. To her credit, Adria wasted no time either, and in only seconds the grate clattered softly into place and then the nondescript shuffling banished the negligent murk from above.

Hawke heard Anders mutter something, and then the metal twisted around the top of his ragged staff was glowing a flickering white-blue. It illuminated Hawke as she knelt beside the man at the foot of the ladder, both legs tucked under him where he'd fallen at an odd angle. Before Anders could speak, she'd drawn her dagger again, and had it pressed to the man's neck. The mage managed a strangled sound of protest before the tip of the blade pierced the Templar's skin, and with a snap of her wrist and the downward pressure of deadly intent, Hawke drew the blade toward her. Blood spurted, pulsing out in a staccato venal gush, and Hawke felt it splatter her cheek. The nameless Templar's eyes snapped open in response to the sudden trauma, and fingers clutched his neck in confused desperation as he writhed, finding the slick wetness and then trying to hold it in. He made no sound beyond a panicked gurgling.

She stood, the growing pool of blood gathering at the tip of her boot as she wiped her blade on her sleeve. She stepped over the dying man without another glance, and met Anders' stunned gaze, though his young charge glared at the Templar with unveiled loathing. Hawke frowned at Anders' expression, replacing her dagger at her back.

_What, Anders? He knew you. You were going to kill him, but it's easier for me. You have enough demons._

She said nothing however, and shouldered past him, down the dark corridor in the direction they'd come.  _Danger indeed._

 


	4. Chapter 4

Anders watched Hawke as she walked away, the shadows that fell outside the flickering illumination from his staff reaching out from the corridor beyond to drown her in darkness. The image of the Templar that lay behind him was scribed upon his eyes, but more so the chilly placidity with which Hawke had drawn the blade across the man's throat. Blood marred her perfect, pale cheek, smudged her bottom lip, black in the blue-tinged glow. It had not phased her.

Anders envisaged her flat countenance as she had brushed past his shoulder and left him behind. He had seen those blue eyes reflect all seasons of the soul: the balmy tenderness of a new thaw, the melting glow of passion, and now the utter chill of indifference. It was easy to say which he preferred, and he recoiled at the influence he had played. Had he not enticed her here? He would be lying to himself were he to pretend to be convinced that her motivation was as she spoke of it; she was of a fractious mold, surely, but gravitated toward reaction with a calculating brand of discretion. She was unlike he, who set fires, rather than extinguished them.

 _ **No!**_  The voice tolled in his skull, resounding with an insistent sonorous crack. **You cannot afford this weakness!**  He winced, tightening his long fingers around the well-worn ash of his staff. Justice edged ever closer to a divide, beyond which compassion was lost, to be replaced by a righteousness tinged with rage. It was Anders' own indignation, his own acrimony, that debased his friend. It was a downward spiral out of which he could not climb.  _Was he prepared to drag everyone he cared for down with him? Even Marian?_

The young mage at his side looked at him now, her own blue eyes suggesting beneath a beetled brow that he had hesitated too long here. He cleared his throat quietly. 

"What is your name?" he asked, one hand automatically touching her cheek, where someone had clearly struck her. She flinched at the contact, then relaxed beneath the warm vibration of his magic. 

"Callie," she answered softly, moisture glistening in her slanted eyes. Her lips quirked. "That tickles." 

Anders smiled past the boiling anger in his throat. He could feel the spiderweb of cracks in the delicate cheek bone, a hair's breadth, perhaps, from being shattered. And for what crime? The phosphorescent green pulse along his fingertips knit the bone back together in short order, leaving him enervated. The sensations of the last few days were all hues of a brilliant high, like being lost among the clouds, and yet since that foolhardy compulsion to throw caution to the wind with Hawke he had hardly slept at all. There had been a time in his youth when he could sail through a week on the road with only a few hours rest, running from Templars and the Circle, but years and hardship were catching up with him.

"We should go," he said, searching the shadows of the sewer shaft. There was only the sound of water trickling slowly along the narrow canal, echoing from the stone like runoff from a spring storm. He turned his attention briefly to the grate that lay in the darkness above them, but there was no indication that they had been discovered, or had Adria. Flashing a final, fatigued smile at Callie, Anders led the way forward, following in Hawke's wake.

 

 _The woman must have eyes like a cat_ , he thought as they traversed the winding path. The illumination shed by his staff transmuted the gloom into a spectrum of grays and blues, but beyond was a black untouched by any source of light. They walked for an interminable time, sharing the relative silence with neither of them attempting to broach it; there was nothing small to confer upon. He was beginning to feel a thrum of concern for Hawke, for while they must be dogging her steps, she remained elusive. And then, as they circumvented a bend in their path, the glow from his staff struck her eyes, the blue rendered a near otherworldly white. It glinted from the metal buckles across her chest, the leather armor as dark as ink, her skin ghost pale. An angel of doom.

She was waiting for them, back pressed against the wall. Her black hair, erratic and disheveled, fell over her forehead, brushing her alabaster nose. The bridge of that nose was streaked with blood, but this mark was intentional. Anders had seen her apply it once, digging her dagger into the tip of her finger, breaking camp in the Deep Roads. Dragging it beneath her eyes. When he'd asked what it meant, Hawke had said that it was a reminder. Of what, she did not delineate. He thought he understood, however. Blood was family. It was meaning. _So what did it have to do with him?_

She was silent, having paused at a fork in the corridor, and she resumed walking when Anders indicated the rightmost path. It was not the direction in which they'd come, for it led south, toward the docks. Hawke matched his pace, remaining at his side and within the sphere of light. The clammy, foul quarters began to slope slowly downward, until at last they came to another ladder. This one was in significantly better repair, cast iron still black, and bracketed solidly to the wall. Alongside it lay a rune, not bigger than his hand, etched into the wall with care. 

Anders replaced his staff in the clasp at his back, preparing to climb, but first regarded his young charge. "We have a man waiting to take you to a safe-house tonight," he told her. "Near the wharf. There will be supplies for you, and coin. You will sail in the morning, Maker willing."

The mage's jaw was stiff, her small chin tilted up in sturdy grit. She nodded shortly, sneaking Hawke a wary, sideways glance. Marian had a marvelous way, Anders thought, of making people ill at ease even as she could be disarmingly charming, rather like an exquisite and exotic feline that is delightfully enchanting until its claws are revealed.

Hawke seemed to register the expression, for the corner of her lips turned just barely up, eyes creasing as they grew marginally narrow. She turned this facade to Anders briefly, amusement there and gone, and then she sprang lithely onto the ladder and was moving up. Anders stifled an objection to her going first, knowing that warning her of potential peril was an ineffectual deterrent.

 

The grate above was solid iron but for three slats that ran through the center. Hawke paused at the top, her head tilted. Listening, it seemed. A silent minute passed, and then she gripped one slat, the muscles of her shoulder bunching as she pushed up. Anders winced inwardly; he had moved this particular grate more than once, and it had always taken both of his arms to heave it aside. Hawke shifted her feet then, purchased nimbly with one boot on a rung and the other crimped along the side of the ladder for balance. A twist of her narrow torso guided the grate aside quietly.

Anders felt a distinct swell of discomfort as Hawke ascended another rung and raised her head above street level, even though he knew that the outlet was nestled at the end of an alley chosen for its relative disuse and the bulwark of a warehouse that blocked the east end from traffic and inquiring eyes. He bit his lip once more against warning her to be careful, and grasped the ladder himself to follow her in short order.

They emerged into a secluded lane liberally draped in shadow. It opened twenty feet to the west at their left, while to the right the brick facade of several warehouses stretched on. The air was a refreshing transition, even while still and hung with the essence of fish and fetid water. The stars were blotted out by bulbous clouds that hinted at rain in that deceitful fashion of late summer, their underbelly painted an unhealthy, pustular yellow in the distance by the lights of Lowtown. There would be no reprieve from the stifling heat for some weeks yet.

Marian's black hair was plastered to her forehead with sweat, and she dragged a hand through it as her eyes scanned their surroundings. Crates and barrels lined the walls on both sides, and were stacked in various holding patterns in the open plaza abutting the harbor. The skeletal fingers of masts and the spiderweb of rigging undulated upon the water, shadows against shadows. A dog barked in the distance, and the sound of a bottle breaking was followed by laughter that rose and then receded. Hawke dipped at the waist and replaced the sewer grate before turning a silent question upon Anders.

The contact they were to deliver Callie to was a sympathizer to the cause whose own son Anders had helped to escape the Circle almost a year prior. The mage adjusted his hood to conceal his bright hair, and responded to Hawke's query by leading them forward, weaving through the detritus of the harbor. The particular access point to the locale had been chosen not only for its concealment, but for its proximity to a string of fisherman's huts; the buildings were not kept locked, and were deserted after dark.

He scrutinized the outer facade of the shanty as they approached. It was little more than one open room within, with a single window on the north side, facing away from the water. No light burned within, but it would not. The young mage dogged his heels closely, and he could almost smell her fear. A blade had found its way into Hawke's grip, and she looked generally unconvinced.

As expected, the door was not locked, though the wood was warped in such a way that Anders had to lift up on the handle to draw it open. It shifted with only a slight vibration of complaint, and he was the first inside, eyes adjusting once more to dimmer surroundings.

 

Several things settled upon his awareness at that moment like logs tossed onto a blaze, catching fire slowly and then sending up sparks of alarm. First, the room was empty – Devlin was always to be found on the upturned crate on the south wall, where he would not be visible through the window. Secondly, the harbor-facing door was open, emitting the stench of the stagnant bay water and the rhythmic slapping of waves against the dock pylons. Anders snapped his hand out, planting the fingers against the door frame and blocking Callie from entering behind him at the instant that he heard a sharp hiss from Hawke.

Anders whirled, feeling the color drain from his face. Emerging from the hut alongside them were two forms, their embossed plate mail identifying them as Templars. With the exception of the man Hawke had dispatched earlier that evening, this was as close as he had been to a member of that order since Karl, and much of that he did not remember. There was no denying the flush of panic that burst in his chest, radiating through his extremities and shattering into myriad, vying concerns. _They could not take Callie back to the Circle to be made Tranquil. They could not hurt Hawke. He would die before they captured him._

**You will not let this happen!** Justice bellowed the command, the impetus of it vibrating down his spine, and he clenched his teeth, hot moisture in his eyes as though he were too close to some searing heat. Anders found his staff in his hand, awareness tunneling – both Templars had their blades drawn, faceless in their steel helms. The cobblestone beneath his feet seemed to lurch, dragged out of his reality to be replaced with the shifting distortion of the Fade, and the fingers that still gripped the door frame dug into the wood, and he was wrenching himself away from that precipice. 

_ “No!”  _ he heard, a garbled snarl from his own lips. It was directed at Justice, who fought him for dominance, but one of the approaching Templars lifted his blade in response.

Hawke was gripping his elbow, her voice telling him to run, though she was firmly planted alongside him, her own body shielding the younger mage. Telling him to run, while she would stop two fully armed, combat trained soldiers? He shook her off, tilting his staff forward toward the approaching Templars, and silver-white light jagged across the space between them. It struck them both, but even as the atmosphere was agitated with electricity, raising the fine hair along his skin, it seemed not to affect their antagonists. 

Hawke had him by the arm again, pulling him back this time, and now her voice was crashing heedlessly upon the cacophony ringing in his ears – the boiling blood of rage, the grinding gravel of fear, and the clamorous insistence of Justice to be loosed. His other hand was before him now, and red-gold bloomed between his fingers and the burning metal twisted around his staff. He turned his palm out, ready to hurl the seething flame forward, when something cold and hard caught at him from behind, and he was jerked roughly back, almost off his feet. The controlled flame collapsed around him like water spilling from a bucket, splashing the dry walls of the shack, catching at the hem of his robes.

Anders scrabbled at the mailed arm that clutched him, the plated fingers digging painfully into his chest while simultaneously slamming his leg against the hut, trying to force his robe to fold over the flames that gnawed at the fabric. 

“ Ought to let you burn alive, instead of give you a quick death,” a voice hissed with malice into his ear, and Anders saw the flaring glow of the fire that licked the shack now reflected in steel as a sword was lifted at his side, and he was twisting in the other direction, trying to break the man's hold. Then there was a startled grunt of pain, the smell of burning flesh, and that grip was crushing him momentarily, and then relaxing so quickly that Anders stumbled to the side in the direction he had been leaning. The Templar's sword flashed, and the mage put one hand out, uselessly but instinctively, to block it. It flew over his head as his assailant pivoted, however, and leveled out, and then something hot struck his face. Fingers brushed it, coming away red, and he saw the blade embedded a foot into the chest of the young mage they had just fought to bring to freedom.

**No!** It was Justice's voice and his voice at once, and the cold rush of the Fade was filling his veins, a wave that drowned Anders beneath its fury. There were voices, but language was lost to him, and then he was submerged in a flood of emotion and power. 

 

-ooo-

 

Hawke had pushed the young mage behind her when she'd seen the other Templar enter the hut from the wharf-side, and had tried to pull Anders back, wanting him to run, rather than fight killers trained for half their lives to kill mages. The stupid girl they had rescued had lurched instead between Hawke and the man who reached for Anders, preventing Marian's blade from intercepting the Chantry soldier. It had resulted in a blade through her chest, her blood splashing Anders, who had stumbled to the ground at Hawke's feet. The rogue reacted with alacrity, adrenaline forcing the tumult into slow-motion.

The Templars approaching from the neighboring building had been forced several steps back by the conflagration Anders had unleashed, which was now pouring vertically over the surface of the shack. The man who had held Anders was tugging his sword back, freeing it from the dead mage, and Hawke seized the moment of his incapacity to drop her short dagger on the ground and pull one of the long blades from her back. She saw the eye-slit of the Templar's helm sweep toward her, body tensing in her direction as his blade came free, the young woman spilling to the ground at her erstwhile rescuer's side. He was positioned poorly in the burning door, however, with two bodies impeding footwork, but he was bloodthirsty and swung his sword at her anyway in a shallow arc, leaning stupidly forward to compensate. Hawke shifted backward at the waist, the tip of the Templar's blade sliding harmlessly past with inches to spare, and followed through by grabbing the man's moving sword arm at the elbow and jerking him forward, using his own momentum. One foot snarled in the robes of the dead woman, and the other connected with Anders' thigh, and then the Templar was overbalanced, falling forward, across Anders and onto the ground. He hit the pavement on his shoulder with a scrape of metal and a grunt of pain, but recovered quickly enough that he rolled onto his back where he might have been able to deflect a blow if Hawke had not been faster. One booted foot slammed into his wrist, and with a cry of pain the fingers spasmed, releasing the sword as Hawke dropped into a crouch. She grasped the lower edge of the man's helm, hauling back, and drove the point of her blade up through his chin.

The first two Templars had recovered themselves, and one shouted in rage, barreling toward her. Hawke jerked her blade free, drawing the other from her back, and angled herself to face the furious soldier, but then Anders was on his feet between them. Hawke had been around magic all her life, and while she had no ability to manipulate it, she felt the pull of the Fade, the shifting and pulsing of mana in the ether, and it radiated from Anders with such ferocity that she felt her stomach lurch. He was ablaze from the inside, radiant blue driven along his veins as though the spirit within would shatter him at the seams to be free. His eyes were no longer his own, and the voice that shrieked at the Templars before them was deeper, echoing from the sunken walls of some unseen well.

The thing that had been Anders leveled his staff at the nearest of the two soldiers, and the night sky around the Templar seemed to tear open, shivering blue and green as though a window into the Fade had been punched through the night, and the miasma became a vicious whirlwind that clawed into the Templar's armor and blazed like the sun. An inhuman scream split the air from the dying soldier, and Hawke registered inevitable, unwanted attention in the form of milling figures in the background. Light spilling from open doorways. The fisherman's hut was fully engulfed, a fact which could easily threaten the entirety of the quay.

_ They had to get out of here. _ Hawke took a step forward, then stumbled as a white hot pain surged up her side from her lower back, tearing a growl of pain from her throat, raw with the broiling smoke. Simultaneously, she lifted a hand to press it questioningly at the source of the agony, and her right leg stopped working. She went down, having only enough control to break a dead drop with her opposite knee, feeling a torrent of anguish as the bone struck pavement with her full weight upon it. Nerveless fingers lost one of her daggers, and the other clutched the second hilt even as she tried to keep herself upright with it against the ground. Hawke's vision swam, full of blue flame, and she saw Anders-Justice twirl his staff around, firelight glaring upon the wicked blade at the end as it tore through the neck of the remaining Templar, blood splattering in a cloud of black mist.

The pain in her side was excruciating and hot, and dimly she knew she'd been stabbed. Her peripheral vision registered the Templar that had caught her from behind, distracted like a fool by this raging thing that had been the man she loved. It was only distantly as well that she heard her own voice crack in a hoarse cry as the soldier's mailed foot slammed into the hand that still clutched her blade, crushing bone. If she could have made it to her feet, she would have, if only to try to stop Anders from getting himself killed. He was her last thought, his name dying on her lips before everything went black, a desperate warning lost to the void. 

 


	5. Chapter 5

Dream and memory, nightmare and wakefulness. They punctuated and bled one into the other until they were inseparable, and the only constant was pain. 

There were a lot of edges of things in her subconscious mind. The brink of a cliff upon the Wounded Coast, falling away onto jagged rocks and a violent, boiling sea below. There was a broken parapet, the view obscured for three hundred and sixty degrees by iron gray fog, and all she could see was that the toes of her boots met the cold, empty air. And there were doors, and though she could never see through them, she knew that beyond lay something endless and vacant. 

A sensation like tiny needles leaked through the haze of her awareness, and Hawke's eyes fluttered open. Or one of them did. The other was gummed, crusted over, and the lids tugged at one another. Her cheek was cold, and a lungful of desperate air pulled rank straw dust into her lungs and she coughed, the motion sending shock waves through her head and her side. A pair of tiny, baleful eyes glared at her from a hand-span away – a rat, perched on her wrist, tiny sharp tooth visible in an open maw. Hawke did not comprehend it's presence, and they regarded one another until the creature seemed to decide she presented no threat. Then it bent to task once more. 

Hawke snarled and flicked her hand violently, scattering the beast across the floor, where it disappeared through a set of metal bars that spanned from the floor to the ceiling. Bars. It came rushing back to her, helped in part by the raging pain in her back and her left hand, which was stretched above her head, tingling and numb, where she lay face down on the floor. 

The Templar had crushed her fingers beneath his boot. She had tried to rise, tried to yell for Anders who was facing away from the man, but then everything had gone black. 

Hawke tried to move the fingers of her wounded hand, and it brought an involuntary croak of pain from her cracked lips. Yes...at least one of her knuckles was broken, and maybe two. Gingerly, she pulled her leg up, and winced again with agony as the busted knee complained sharply. 

They had mostly carried her here. The Gallows. She recalled enough of the trip in flashbacks that she must have been conscious for more than a few moments. And she had tried to fight them, because defeat was not in her repertoire of talents. That, and because she could not just watch them take Anders. It was his nightmare. 

Anders. 

She bit back the pain and used her elbow to lever herself up. It was dark, the only light somewhere out of sight in the corridor outside the bars. She heard muffled voices, rising and falling, and something glass shattering on stone. Then there were footsteps, a familiar metal shuffling against stone, and cursing, growing louder along the hallway. Hawke managed to roll herself over onto her back, both elbows beneath her, but when she tried to maneuver a foot beneath herself for purchase to stand, the muscles of her right side shrieked in protest. Stabbed. How was she not dead? 

And then the torch light flung across the corridor flickered, and shadows morphed and shrank along the walls until they became figures. Two Templars, and between them, a feral creature, blond hair awry, matted with blood, coat gone, and shirt torn and stained red at the neck and sleeves. Hawke's teeth ground together in hurt of a different kind, and she tried again to come to her feet, but only succeeded in getting her good knee underneath her. 

The two Templars, helmets off to reveal faces akin with strain and loathing, shoved Anders roughly along the hallway, and she heard him snarl, his voice choked with what sounded like overuse and pain: “You have to let her go!” 

The soldier on his left arm jerked him hard toward his body, and Anders' step caught as he almost stumbled. “We don't have to do shit, demon-spawn.” 

“I'm not a ...” Anders began, but the Templar snapped to a halt, twisting at the waist and slamming a mailed glove into the mage's mouth. Hawke hissed in anger as Anders bent forward, sputtering, and spit blood onto the floor. She channeled her fury into her muscles, pushing herself up tremulously, her weight distributed mostly on her bad knee because it didn't strain the throbbing wound in her back. While the Templar was turned away from her, facing Anders, she ran a hand along her torso, and inhaled with acute relief. The leather cuirass she wore had several straps over her ribs, wide metal buckles almost seeming more decorative than purposeful, but that was not entirely the case. Watching the soldiers intently, she tucked two fingers into the chest piece, between her breasts, and slipped the dagger from its molded leather sheath, where it had been concealed from anything but a stripped search by the overlay of metal. 

The Templar flexed his fingers, and turned back toward the cell door. Hawke shifted, wrapping one arm around a bar several away from the latch where the Chantry soldier was slipping in a metal key, still clutching Anders by bicep. The mage looked at her then, anguish in the set of his jaw, which was already purpling from the Templar's blow, the lip split and oozing blood. He was a head taller than the man to his left, but he balanced on the balls of his feet to see her more clearly, frantic eyes roving her figure. They grew round when he saw the dagger in her hand, for she'd turned her palm just enough for him to glimpse it, to know she was armed. Anders shook his head once, and mouthed “no.”

Hawke knew if there was any purpose or any means to fight their captors, Anders would take it, and so at the expression of stark alarm on his face, she hesitated. Whatever lay beyond this cell, Anders had seen and she had not. Discreetly, she slipped the weapon beneath the hardened leather bracer, pommel first, where a practiced flick of the wrist would have it again in her palm. The Templar had the key turned in the lock, and the man glanced at his companion, and there was an exchange of some kind: a lifted chin, a stern curving of lips, and then both of Anders' arms were wrenched behind him. The mage grunted in pain as the larger man pulled his wrists back and up, locked above his hips. 

The man who has relinquished his grip on Anders was now pulling the gate of the cell open. The lascivious countenance he turned on Hawke was not necessary for her to know what was about to happen. She disentangled herself from the bar, adjusting her center of gravity, poised to meet whatever this man intended for her. 

“Hawke, don't...” the words left Anders in a panicked rush, and were cut off violently as the man that held him shoved him forward into the bars. They reverberated as he struck them, his eyes squeezing shut as he turned his face just in time to absorb most of the impact with the side of his head. 

The distraction was all the Templar within the cell needed. Faster than Hawke would have suspected with half-plate, a hand shot out and snatched her by the elbow, hauling her toward him. The movement pulled her weight fully onto her bad knee, and it obliterated her sense of balance, so that when the man forced her around and propelled her into the bars, she foundered. Then when he mashed curled fingers into the wound in her back, she screamed, choking it off as quickly as it had begun, deteriorating into a sound half-groan, half-growl. Fuck. Why hadn't she expected that? Shrieking like a little girl did not improve her situation. 

The man had her by both elbows now, holding her arms at her sides. Hawke curled her fingers up toward the bracer that concealed her dagger even as the Templar pressed himself fully against her. There were some forms of abuse Marian Hawke might tolerate, might be able to dismiss, but if this man intended to violate her, one of them going to die in the effort. Even now, his breath was hot on her throat, his scent of sweat and tobacco, and she could hear the boorish leer in his voice as he drawled salaciously against her skin. 

“You'll tell Meredith what she wants to know, mage. You'll tell her, or Kerick and I will make sure your lovely lady pays for it.” He ground his hips roughly against Hawke's backside, teeth scoring her flesh. “Over,” he punctuated this word with a swipe of his tongue and a thrust against her. “And over.” 

“Let her go!” Anders snarled, but it only brought a rasp of nefarious laughter from her captor, vibrating repulsively through the body that had enveloped hers. 

“Oho, Kerrick,” the man snickered, and Hawke felt his upper body lift away, the moisture left by the assault of his vile tongue drying in the chill air. “I think we've found his weakness.” 

The word had no sooner left his mouth than Hawke's head snapped back, and she felt the delightful crunch of bone as it connected with his nose, eliciting an an outraged, pained yelp, and the hands that held her dropped away. She twisted, burning pain lancing through her side, and her erstwhile assailant was holding his nose, blood seeping between two fingers. He glared at her, then dropped the hand. Blood leaked from his nostrils, and as it coursed over his lips, they curled up in a toothy, copper grin, and he spat at her feet.

“Feisty bitch, isn't she?” He glanced at his companion, then at the stricken Anders, still pressed against the bars. “Mage has his very own attack dog.” They both seemed to find this terribly funny, and it seemed Hawke had curiously diffused the situation with her display of ready violence. She slumped against the bars, risking a surreptitious glance at Anders. 

He met her eyes, and then they slid away suddenly. It was not enough warning, nor was the blurred shift in the air that preceded the blow. The Templar's fist struck her in the nose, full force, driving her head back sharply into the bars, and her vision instantly swam, dark spots replacing the cell, agony blooming through her skull. She heard Anders' voice, but words seemed stretched and sluggish and too far away. Then the ground reached up and dragged her down, and she tasted familiar, tangy, hot salt. 

Hawke shook her head, blinking furiously to restore her sight, not even bothering to stem the blood that oozed from her busted nose. The polished iron greaves of the Templar at whose feet she had fallen vanished from her field of vision, stepping around her. There was a shuffle, clipped words, the metallic rattle of keys being removed from the lock, a grunt, and the clang of heavy steel that resounded through the bars of the cage with a condemning intonation. 

Then Anders was there, on his knees beside her, his hands on her, touching her shoulders, fingers trailing down her back, lifting her chin gently. 

“Merciful Andraste, Marian...” His voice was low, plaintive, and one thumb was wiping away the blood under her nose, and then the fingers were hovering over it, hesitant. Then his brows bunched over his nose and, strangely, his bruised golden eyes filled with tears. “I can't help you...” His voice was broken, somewhere between a sigh, and a sob.

Hawke was still dazed, and did not comprehend the significance of those words. She did register his coarse despair, the way his bottom lip was split in two, smeared with red, and the way the skin beside his soft mouth was scraped raw from the impact of metal on flesh. Something acerbic and wrathful surged in her chest, a need for vengeance. 

Vengeance. Her mind replayed the interactions of the last quarter hour, of Anders unbound but curiously passive, of the mage maintaining such careful control of his volatile, assertive, and erratic passenger. Perhaps he saw the question in her eyes, for he went on. 

“I tried to heal you before they … took me. I think you were … almost gone when they brought us here. The blade in your back ...” He didn't finish, dropping his eyes, slumping in on himself. He traced the outline of her leg with one hand, fingers just grazing her knee. “They force fed me Magebane. I have nothing.” 

Hawke wiped her nose, hand coming away wet with blood. “Magebane?” She squinted at him. 

He gingerly picked up her hand, the one the Templar had crushed beneath his boot. The first two fingers were curled in toward her palm of their own accord. He traced one knuckle almost too softly to feel, and Hawke saw the line of his jaw stiffen before he spoke again. “It's a poison. It drains mana. I have no idea how long it will last but they gave me … a lot.” He looked up again, wretched sorrow scrawled across his battered face. “I'm so sorry Marian. I...” his voice caught. 

Hawke reacted on instinct, leaning forward, into him, and rested her head in the crook between his shoulder and neck. His familiar smell was warmly comforting, and the hand that had been resting gently on her back held her to him. She could feel the tremor of helplessness in his muscles, the echo of fear and outrage. 

“I'm a big girl, Anders,” she told him, her lips a wry smile against his neck. She sat in a cell in the Gallows with an apostate mage she'd helped to kill Templars, but damned if she'd treat impending death with reverence. “I knew what I was getting into.” 

Anders' fingers tightened on her shoulder, his cheek pressing into her hair, caressing the texture. “I knew better,” he lamented bitterly, and the resentment in his tone was for himself. “I should never have involved you in this. I have no idea how I could be so … fucking stupid.” 

Hawke shifted and moved her good hand, the one that had been propping her upright, to touch him. She felt weak, and managed only to curl her fingers into the fabric of his shirt and give it a tug for emphasis. “It's a good thing I'm here to save you.” 

The laugh that shuddered through him was weak, a forlorn exhalation. “I can only hope for mercy for you,” he said after a moment. “I will tell Meredith whatever she wants to know. They can have me, if it will buy your safety. I know it's too late to be thinking about that, but ...” 

Hawke sat upright now, stiffly. “Anders...you will not.” Her voice was clipped, stern, but the expression he returned was equally obstinate. 

He touched her face carefully, eyes lingering sadly on her busted nose, then he leaned close, resting his forehead against hers for a moment before tilting his mouth toward her, brushing her lips with his, the touch feather-light and then gone. “I would do anything. Even...”

“Anders.” Hawke interrupted him, but he went on anyway.

“...even if it means that ...”

“Anders.” Hawke squeezed his thigh with her hand. “Shut up. We'll get out of here.” Bravado was second nature.

The look he gave her held no faith. “Marian...you're wounded. I'm powerless.” 

A feminine voice, unexpected and muted, nevertheless carried through the bars behind them with a defiant humor. “Well, I'm not powerless.” 

They both looked about as one, and there, crouched only a few feet away beyond the cell partition, was a face familiar to them both. Bethany smirked, an expression that was a ghost of her sister's, her eyes alight. 

Hawke returned the look, albeit a bit darker, and more liberally painted in blood, then turned the expression on Anders. 

“Don't underestimate Hawkes, sweetheart.”


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Anders' creator refers to Anders as bipolar. Being in the mental health field, I have surmised he fits criteria for bipolar 2, which I have some personal experience with. I have written him in a way that represents his mania as sleeplessness, short periods of grandiosity that are magnified around Hawke, and high lability (moodiness) that can tend toward aggression and irritability on one end and deep depression on the other. I think if one reads between the lines, and listens to his party banter, he's far more naturally aggressive than he comes across in the romance chat. If true to the illness, he has no control over it, and probably despises this part of himself. You're about to see both sides of this in this chapter and later on.

Bethany's hands were wrapped around the bars as she knelt beyond the gates. It was strange to see her in the garb of a Circle mage, the iridescent blue skirt pooling about her, gold bands around her upper arms. For the briefest, unpalatable moment, a viscous image of the day Marian Hawke's childhood had ended uncoiled from the wellspring of her soul. She had been twelve years old, all knobby, skinned knees, sun-rose skin, and wild hair. Her father had been away, for what reason she could not clearly remember, and had taken Carver with him, so that it was only Marian, Bethany, and her mother.

The Templar had arrived in plain clothes, his shield and weapon identifying him, and Hawke recalled he had been cheerful, fresh-faced, and had mentioned with some exuberance that he was upon his way for his first leave to visit family. Their mother had offered a graceful dancing discourse, Amell to the core, but Bethany, only nine at the time and the spitting image of Leandra, had been terrified. When the Templar, who was ostensibly asking only for directions, had leaned down to speak with her, a hand had gone out to tweak her becoming brown curls with a grin. Bethany had reacted with fear, raising her own hand to ward off the gesture, and had shocked the man with uncontrolled electricity.

Marian had watched the Templar's face change from one of pleasant goodwill to one of antipathy and distrust, and he had pulled away, hand going to his sword. Leandra had immediately pushed Bethany behind her, who burst into tears. The man was espousing a litany about his duty, and the blade that he drew from his scabbard seemed to be materializing in slow motion.

Even as a child, Marian had loved daggers. She had hounded the smith in the nearby village with her buoyant enthusiasm for his craft, and her willingness to sweep floors, work bellows, and polish blades until he finally began to teach her. The blade she'd worn at her side that day was her first creation. It was a fair effort, though the pommel did not fit perfectly, leaving it a bit wobbly, and necessitating that strips of leather wound about the grip and the hilt. It was a good six inches (she'd always liked _long_ blades), and it was utilitarian enough, with a fine edge. It would slice cheese, shear leather, and break the reeds her mother made baskets from. 

Hawke discovered that day that it would also kill a man. It was the first time, as well, that Hawke had experienced that curious way that time could manage to flow backward, to ebb with inertia. The way spoken words lost syntax and syllable and became enmeshed in the rush of blood in the ears. The way the body and mind amalgamated extemporaneously, thus that thought equaled response as though the two were one and the same. Before the Templar could draw his blade even half from his scabbard, before her mother could utter more than a few terrified words of protest, Marian's dagger had left its little hand made sheath and plunged into the man's chest, all the way to the hilt. 

She remembered the astounded expression that had overtaken that disdainful sneer, and recalled satisfaction at wiping it from his face. She remembered the way he'd tried to speak, but had only gurgled in shock, and then his legs had gone out from under him, and Marian had stood, rage still singing in her ears, the music of war, and watched him die. The only person in her family who had not looked at her later as though she were a viper had been her father, who understand the natural incapability of hesitating when that which one loved was threatened. 

And now, seeing her beloved sister immured in the trappings of all that first her father and then Marian had fought to belay, she felt everything Anders had ever said about mages rights, about Templars, about the Circles, surging as a molten madness in her gut. She had done this thing with him because she loved him and wanted to be by his side, yes, but she had also done it because she hated everything the Gallows represented. Her failure to protect her family, the only legacy her father had left for her.  _Would that she could burn it all to the ground._

 

Bethany was speaking now, melodic voice barely a whisper. “They are waiting for Meredith, but word has been sent. She wants to … question Anders herself.” She cast a glance at the renegade mage, a mixture of compassion and distress. Then her shrewd eyes took in their state, frowning at first at the debasement visited upon them by the hospitality of their captors, and then raising a brow with a wisp of a smile at the way they sat entwined, radiating intimacy. “All it took was a near death experience for you two to wake up?”

Marian gave her a bland look, and Anders appeared stricken, but then Bethany was serious again. “Mar...I can get to Anders' staff … but I don't know what they did with your weapons. There's a way out of here, leads to Darktown. Its...”

“I know where you mean,” Anders said in a low voice.

Bethany was nodding. “I fail to be surprised. There are only two guards on right now, because it's after midnight. When they heard you'd been brought in, Anders... a lot of mages are up, gossiping, being general hens to get in the collective Templar hair and keep them busy herding them back to their quarters. If we're lucky, Absolm and Kerrick are all we'll have to get past.”

“Absolm,” Anders muttered, his voice dark, and Hawke glanced at him. His eyebrows were squeezed into a V over his aquiline nose. “That is the same man who brought me here?”

“Yes,” Beth said. “He's a nasty one. Hopefully we can just avoid him.”

Anders grunted and his eyes were slits, like an affronted cat, but he said nothing else.

“Beth...” Hawke said. “If you do this, you have to come with us. They'll execute you. Make you Tranquil...I'm not leaving without you.”

Bethany released the bars then, waving a hand dismissively. “First things first. What do you need to pick this lock? Anders' staff I can do, keys I can't.” She glanced again at Marian's face, at the disarrayed nose and the blood, then at Anders, squinting. “And... I can get lyrium.” There was a layer of question in the tone.

Anders shook his head, grimacing. “Won't do any good. They made me swallow enough Magebane to kill a horse. The taint in my blood tempers some of it, but it will have to wear off on its own.”

“Andraste's lily white ass,” Bethany growled, face crinkling in an expression just like her twin brother had made when faced with something detestable. “Bastards.”

Hawke had removed her hand from Anders thigh, flexing the wrist and flicking her forearm, bringing her sole remaining weapon into her palm. “Keys,” she said, brandishing it.

Bethany raised an eyebrow, then nodded. “Get the door open. I'll be back in ten minutes, or less. If something goes wrong … I'll … think something.” She stood, and had taken a step to leave before Hawke's voice stopped her.

“Beth...be careful.”

Her little sister gave her a half a glance, and smirked. “I'll be just like you, Mar.” Then she was hurrying away.

Marian exhaled a slow, fretful sigh. “Annnd that is what I'm afraid of,” she muttered under her breath. Then she turned her attention to Anders, and held her left hand aloft between them. “Out of joint or broken?”

His forehead creased briefly, surprised perhaps by that question, then he slipped into clinical form, his healer's fingers just grazing the skin as he balanced her wrist with one hand. He traced the knuckles, outlining the bone, peering closely at the coloration of the skin. There was bruising, swelling, and he pressed softly above this. “How badly does this hurt?”

Marian shrugged. “Could be worse.”

“Out of joint, I think. Or your pain threshold is unnatural.”

“Fix it.” She set her jaw and pierced him with a determined gaze.

To his credit, he merely inhaled shakily, maneuvering her hand lower, so that her fingers pointed inward at the level of his waist. He placed his thumb in the webbing of her own, the others molding as iron over the top of her hand. His cool grip was on the two grotesquely angled fingers then, and he murmured “You might want to bite down on something.”

“Just do it,” Hawke growled.

Anders flashed her a look that was apologetic but hard, and then he was all business again. With an impossibly strong wrench of his own hand, he pulled one finger out, up, and twisted it deftly. It popped back into joint with a feeling not unlike being torn off, and moisture sprang to Hawke's eyes. The only sound she made was a muffled yelp, but Anders didn't give her time to think about the pain, repeating the same action with the other finger.

“Flaming _shit_ ,” Hawke hissed. Anders was holding her hand how, palms on either side of it, the fingers flat between them. 

“I can't forgive myself for this, Marian...” he said quietly, not looking at her. 

“Blame the Templars, Anders. No war is won without pain.” 

He did look at her then, sharply, a jolt of surprise and then a spark of fire in his eyes. He opened his mouth to speak, but Marian didn't give him time. She pulled her hand away carefully, planting her good one, still clutching the dagger, onto the floor to push herself up. 

“Help me,” she ordered, and he complied, standing and pulling her to her feet by her elbow. She tried the fingers he had just remedied, and winced.

“We need to bind them,” he told her. “They will hurt until I can..”

“There's not time.” Marian was moving toward the door. 

“Damnation Hawke,” Anders snapped. “Why are you so bloody stubborn?”

She slid the dagger through the bars, angling it toward the lock, and gave him a bright smirk over her shoulder. “You love it.” 

He exhaled and folded his arms, and though he tried to look fierce and put out, there was a tiny smile hovering at the corner of his lips. 

Hawke went to work on the door, ignoring all the thousand points of pain in her body as she concentrated. Her forehead leaned against the bars, the penetrating cold a point of focus, and she used the lower three fingers of her left hand to guide the small dagger into the locking mechanism. This was a game she loved, her touch the caress of a lover, teasing the mechanisms within to find the sweet spots. It was unsophisticated, only two tumblers, not designed with the idea that anyone would have the wherewithal or the audacity to pick a lock within a fortified prison. She jiggled the blade up, down, back, forth, and in only seconds there was an audible click.

She withdrew the blade, and pressed its tip to her lips with a slight flourish, then winked at Anders. “Can't do that with a staff,” she grinned. 

The mage snorted, but his eyes were warm. “You never cease to amaze, Marian Hawke.” 

“I know. It's tiring.” She sighed with a flair of melodrama. “You owe me a hot bath and a beer.” 

The natural response that passed across his features was humor, but it was replaced quickly with gravity. He moved closer to her, his fingers resting on her chest lightly before sliding up to her cheek, his touch terribly gently. 

“I owe you much more than that,” he whispered thickly. 

Hawke felt herself respond to his touch, the proximity of him, in manifold ways. He needed no magic to be electric, a force of gravity that extracted buried appetites, making of her carefully shored walls little more than diaphanous, insubstantial filament. He was like a flame, and she a moth that liked the way it felt to burn. 

Her lips parted, tongue wetting them, but before she could deflect his magnetism with some flippant comment, the shadows shifted in the corner of her eye, and the moment crumbled, replaced with the reality of the Gallows and pain and the desperate need to escape. Then Bethany was there again, all silent hurried steps, flowing robe, and wielding Anders' staff. She came to a stop at the door of their cage, and opened her mouth to express the question on her face, but Hawke responded by shoving the door with her foot. It swung open without a sound, and Bethany gave it a fierce glare of triumph. Then she was shoving the staff into Anders hand. 

“We've got to move,” she hissed. “Kerick went to the kitchens, so it's just Absolm, and he's down the hall, opposite where we want to go.” She was already walking, looking over her shoulder to see if they were following. 

They were behind her, Anders at her right shoulder whispering sharply: “It's just those two? No one else near?” 

Bethany nodded, and as they reached the end of the corridor, it was apparent that the dungeons, in the lowest part of the Gallows, were relatively empty. Hawke recalled what Anders had said about those mages that Meredith and her thugs deemed a threat being simply made tranquil or … disappeared. The emptiness of this place seemed to suggest a sinister truth to that. Before them, the corridor split in a T, each side dimly lit, and doorways opened along both halls, though a stairway was visible at the end of the left. Bethany pointed at it. “That's our out. Two flights to the cellars, and then the tunnel. Absolm will be back any minute, so we have to ...”

“How long ago did the other one go for the kitchens?” Anders was asking Bethany as they paused at the fork to scrutinize their surroundings. 

She gave him a quizzical, slightly irritated look. “I came as soon as he went upstairs. He always comes up around this time. So when he ...” 

She stopped speaking abruptly when Anders whirled away from her and was moving down the hall, in the opposite direction Bethany had indicated. 

“ _Anders!”_ Hawke hissed. He didn't respond, steps taking him rapidly down the hall in the direction of the Templar they were supposed to be avoiding. As he passed one of the flickering torches that provided the corridor's only light, he snatched it off the wall, and it plunged his wake in darkness. 

“What the...” Bethany said, her voice shrill, nervous. “Mar, we have to _go!_ What is he _doing?_ ”

Hawke muttered a curse, thinking she had an idea, then grabbed Bethany by the wrist. “He's being a fucking fool,” she told her sister. She pulled Bethany after her until she was following willingly, then picked up her pace to catch up with Anders. She was in time to see him pausing in an open doorway, through which shadows were escaping onto the wall of the corridor. Absolm, the Templar who had assaulted Hawke and had threatened her with rape, must be within. 

_Anders, you idiot..._

He had his staff in one hand, and the torch in the other, and he was peering around the door frame. Hawke was within a few steps of being able to snatch his arm and jerk him back, but he threw her a glance that would have stopped most people in their tracks with its icy fury, and before she could stop him he stepped into the open space of the door and disappeared into it.

“Fuck me,” Hawke snapped, as Bethany gasped in surprise at this apparent casualty of logic. She reached the door just as a startled exclamation announced that the Templar had seen Anders, and that whatever confrontation the mage intended was not to be avoided. Seconds later, she was in the room, seeing a mage with no mana, a staff little more than a stick, and a torch facing a fully armed, armored Templar. She brandished her dagger, as weak as she was, and moved a few steps forward. Bethany had remained outside at her silent order, watching for the return of the second Templar.

“What is this holy horse shit?” Absolm railed. “How the...” He drew his sword, and then laughed. “Meredith wanted you alive, but I don't see how we have that choice now.” He took a step forward, raising the blade, with Anders still standing perfectly still. “Actually, maybe I'll just fuck you up... let you live long enough to see what we're going to do to your woman. Kerick will be back any second, and then...”

He didn't finish whatever he'd been about to say, for Anders staff thumped against the ground, and then the metal binding at its tip turned red, throwing sparks, and he swung it, hard. It came at the Templar from the man's left, and as his sword was in his right hand, he had no chance to bring the blade up. The tip of the staff struck the soldier in the side of the face, and exploded with flame and a low, deep, dragging boom that threw the man backward into the wall. Anders approached him, and Hawke was mesmerized with the energy of fury that radiated from him. Possessed, though Vengeance was ostensibly held at bay by the Magebane.

The Templar was crumpled, half sitting, against the wall, his face raw and blistered from the staff's blow, and then Anders twirled the weapon and slammed the wooden end with breaking force into the man's nose, already swollen and skewed from Hawke's blow. The Templar screamed in pain, even as Anders was fumbling with a leather cord wound around the lower third of his staff. The strip fell to the ground, and he thumbed some mechanism Hawke couldn't see, and the end of the staff became a wooden casing that fell away to reveal a blade perhaps three feet long. The mage pointed this at the man, shoving it beneath his chin.

The Templar stopped spluttering, and held his hands out, no longer full of bravado and threats. “Don't! Please! Mercy!”

“You don't deserve _mercy,_ ” Anders hissed.

“I wouldn't really have hurt her! I've got sisters. I would never...” The man was babbling, as Hawke realized belatedly, stupidly, what this was all about. It wasn't that this man was a Templar, it was that he'd hurt her. Threatened her. _Maker's balls._

“Anders,” she pleaded, afraid for the healer to indulge in something so savage as this. She knew, better than anyone, what this kind of killing did to a soul, but he did not heed her.

“What do you want me to do?!” The Templar begged. “I can get you out of ...”

He didn't finish, because the blade of Ander's staff dipped down and plunged into his chest, through a lung, and blood bubbled up on the Templar's lips in a shocked, spluttering cough of agony. Anders jerked the blade free, then he leaned down, and said lowly but clearly enough that Hawke heard him.

“What do I want you to _do?_  I want you to _burn_.”

He tossed the burning torch onto the Templar, and then dipped his staff into its flames as the Templar shrieked and tried to paw it it. As soon as the staff touched the flame, it burst into a conflagration twice its size and enveloped the man, whose screams were quickly replaced by panicked flailing and a low desperate sobbing, his pierced lung collapsing and awfully robbing him of sound as he was consumed.

Anders watched for a moment, and then he turned, meeting Hawke's eyes. Her own were wide, aghast not at the fate of the Templar, but at the way her gentle mage had been devoured by retribution. Perhaps Vengeance did not need his mana. Perhaps, as Anders said, they were truly one.

There was no apology in his expression. Only cold satisfaction.

“Now,” he said, voice husky with subdued and righteous fury. “We may go.”

 

 


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I listened to "Don't Deserve You" by Plumb on repeat for basically this entire chapter, in case you need a soundtrack.

“I can just hear Varric's newest joke,” Hawke drawled, tugging awkwardly at her belt buckle with one hand. “A radical apostate and a mercenary walk into the Gallows...”

Anders chuckled, but the tone was muted. Forced amusement, perhaps. Marian looked over her shoulder, and he was watching her. He looked akin to how she felt. Battered, bruised, bloody. There was no exultation, however, which infected Hawke in such a way that she felt giddy with it. They had simply walked out of the prison that would have been their death, and Bethany's eventual tomb, and had taken her little sister with them. Even now, she was downstairs with their mother, the two of them having devolved into delirious tears that Marian Hawke had no time for.

“I wouldn't say we actually walked...” he tried, forcing a twitch of his lips that was intended as a smile. It was replaced quickly, his tired eyes dark and gazing at her with such a mixture of emotion that she paused, the buckle of her belt only partially released.

She sighed, and crossed the few steps between them. The door was open just beyond, and he hovered there as though he might flee. Bodahn passed quietly behind him, followed in step by Sandal, each toting steaming water that was filling the large copper tub before the raging fire. Marian had told Anders he owed her a hot bath, and she'd meant it.

She stopped within only inches of the mage, turning her face up to him. “Stop it.”

Anders' eyebrows came down, and he frowned. “Marian...” he whispered, but she dispatched the space between them, her body melding against his, and her good hand slipped around his back and held him to her. She brushed his chin with the arch of her cheek, then pressed her lips against the underside of his jaw, raspy with days of unshaven growth that was more beard now than stubble.

“I don't deserve you,” he croaked, and she felt the hitch in his throat, the tremor in the muscles of his torso that was his instinct to pull away. He still did not touch her, arms limp at his sides, but the fingers of one hand clenching and unclenching.

Hawke drew back enough to look him in the face, and he stubbornly didn't meet her gaze for a moment, but was finally drawn furtively to her intense magnetism.

“I'm not that much of a catch,” you know, she said, her tone low and teasing. “I'm rather bloody-minded. I don't wear dresses or pretty shoes. I can drink dwarves under tables. I have a mouth like a sailor...” She trailed off when he squeezed his eyes shut, his nose wrinkling as he vibrated with laughter, still stubbornly trying to fight a smile, but mostly failing.

“But you...” Marian moved her hand from his back to slip it through his long blonde hair, keeping her tone light, an impish smirk in her eyes “...are so much prettier.” He snorted, but she went on, trailing her fingers across the lines of his face, down his neck to his chest. “And you have room in your heart for so much more than I.” His eyes grew soft at that, and she reached down, taking his hand and pulling it up to her face, where she spread his fingers against her cheek. She smiled, lifting her chin so that her lips were a breath from his when she added: “And you have the hands of the Maker himself.”

He slumped, thawing, and pressed his lips to hers hungrily at first, finally putting an arm around her, holding her to him at her lower back, away from the wound in her side. Then his kiss was soft, his tongue slipping between her lips and caressing hers searchingly, savoring her. When he pulled away, he whispered against her mouth: “ _Andraste have mercy on my soul._ ”

The door shut behind them, signaling that the dwarves had delivered the last of the water, and the tub steamed invitingly. Marian had made a point to her mother and sister that she had no wish to be disturbed unless Templars appeared on the doorstep, and so she brushed Anders' lips once more. “Get this armor off me.”

His lips parted, but Hawke did not let him speak, adding a vixenish “ _Now,_ ” and his pupils dilated, chest rising as he inhaled deeply. Then his hands were on her, doing her bidding. 

Fingers released the buckles at the sides of the cuirass, and Hawke angled her forehead into the crook of his shoulder as he worked, pressed softly against his throat so she could feel his pulse. She broke the contact only when she felt that he was ready to lift the armor over her head, which he did carefully. Anders started to turn it around in his hands, to examine the place where the knife had pierced her back, but she caught it with her own hand and pulled it out of his grasp, and it fell to the floor. His eyes met hers, and her own were wide, commanding him to abandon the healer in him. His lips twitched, fighting that natural urge, and then the golden eyes were even darker, and his fingers tangled in the laces of her undershirt, pulling them with urgency, all the way out until they snaked to the floor, and he pushed the garment back, over her shoulders. The imperativeness of the action slowed as he slid it off her arms, Anders' fingers relishing the feel of her bare skin, and he dropped his head to press his lips against her collarbone, then the base of her throat, and Marian hummed with pleasure.

She grasped the edge of his shirt, still blood stained and ratty from their ordeal, and pulled it over his head just as her own hit the floor. She wanted to feel his skin against hers, and knotted her fingers in his hair and pulled his lips to hers, the warmth of his chest pressed against her bare breasts. The kiss was harder than she meant for it to be, her passion for him scalding and then tasting barely of copper from the wound on his bottom lip that he could not heal. He did not flinch from it, but wrapped his arms around her, nails scoring the roundness of her rear, holding her hips to his.

Hawke broke the kiss at last, stepping back in his embrace, and licked her lips, knowing that she was tasting his blood. She touched his lip with her thumb, gently, trying to wipe it away, but he turned his head away from the touch and wiped it away with the back of his hand. Then he was laughing, eyes crinkling.

“Maker's breath, Marian. Can we really make love covered in each others' blood?”

Hawke raised an eyebrow and gave him a languid smile. “Bit primal, don't you think?”

He stopped laughing, and his eyes widened comically, then he exhaled in exasperated humor. “Sometimes I don't know whether to be as afraid of you as I am in love with you.” He reached out and grasped the laces of her pants, pulling, and softened that statement by adding a devilish, sensuous “Fox.”

Hawke's smile transformed into a grin. “I think I have you right where I want you then,” she purred.

Anders hooked his thumbs at the sides of the pants he'd loosened, catching her smalls as well, and pushed down, so that they slipped down to her ankles. Then he ran his hands along the curve of her hips, his thumbnails just brushing the outline of her sex. “Do you?” he asked, voice dark. “Or is it the other way around?”

His touch coaxed goose flesh along her skin, an electric tremor along her spine, and the wet warmth of desire between her legs. She was content to watch him without moving, as he gazed at her naked body, his eyes clouded with desire, until his gaze finally snapped back to her face, and he grinned sheepishly.

“Water's getting cold, huh?” He took a step back from her, loosening his own trousers, shoving his boots off with his toes. He left Hawke in her awkward position, her pants around her ankles and her boots still on, and he appeared not a little amused by her subsequent struggle to join him in undress. As such, he was settling in the copper tub before she untangled herself from the remainder of her clothing, and his deep sigh of bliss was evident even above the spitting fire.

 

Anders sank all the way into the water, head disappearing while his knees broke the surface, and then he was sitting upright again as Hawke approached. His hair was plastered against his cheeks, across his forehead, skin pleasantly flushed pink and eyes slits of contentment that glowed in the firelight. He held his hand over the lip of the tub, and though Hawke hardly needed the assistance, she took it anyway, stepping in. The water was steaming, and she hissed softly at the burn, and then was suddenly grateful for his support as her knee, a very disgusting array of black and purple where she'd fallen on it, threatened to buckle while holding her full weight as she brought her other leg in.

She lowered herself into the water, just shy of scalding, but eliciting a groan of luxurious satisfaction. Anders opened his legs wider as she sat down, and wrapped them around her, pulling her back, flush against him, his feet nestled between her legs. One arm snaked around her torso, and the other brushed moisture through her hair, guiding her head gently back to rest against his shoulder.

Despite the fact that his flesh, his body, was no stranger to hers, Hawke still found herself stiff for a moment, recoiling at the placid intimacy, the sensation of being sheltered. His touch, however, was sorcery, sensual without being sexual. His toes caressed the underside of one calf, fingers resting on her lower belly, just brushing the bone of her hip. His chest rose and fell with her own, a lulling rhythm, and the fingers that stroked her hair back coaxed her head slightly to the side, and instead of kissing her, he merely rested his lips against the side of her forehead. She found tension leaving her muscles, eyes slipping closed so that the room swam in a distant haze of steam, flickering with the myriad oranges of flame and the soothing yellow of candlelight.

They did not speak for a long while, seemingly by mutual consent, and her thoughts drifted lazily, enjoying the tranquilizing tactility of his fingers in her hair, the slow, even moisture of his breath against her skin, the feel of his heartbeat between her shoulder blades. How long had it been since she had slept? The last few days seemed to bleed together, a taut erratic maelstrom of severe agitation.  _Days_ . Who was she kidding? That was her life, and seemed always to have been. She had never assumed that there was aught else. Serenity, repose, stillness. These things were anathema. Except, perhaps, in this exact moment.  _With him._

She had drifted almost to sleep, lulled beyond conscious thought, having become only material, just flesh, when Anders stirred. He kissed her cheekbone, and then there was amusement in his voice as he mumbled in her ear.

“Now the water really is getting cold.” He fumbled at the table beside the tub, and a bar of soap was in his hand. It was a luxury Hawke's mother unapologetically indulged in. They shared it, and devolved more than once into laughter because the copper tub was not entirely large enough for two people to successfully do more than fall asleep in one another's arms. Marian let him wash her hair for her, feeling a mix of silly and stirred by the utmost tenderness in his hands – hands that only hours before had burned a man alive for threatening her. He made her turn around to face him, and applied the same care to cleaning the blood from her face, fingers stroking the skin with a feather-light touch, not wanting to cause any further pain from what Marian assumed was a broken nose. Or close to.

At last, they were both as clean as they were likely to be, and the water was indeed freezing, despite the crackling fire nearby. Thick red robes served to towel off, and Anders crossed the room, settling on the edge of the bed, feet on the floor, rubbing the moisture out of his hair. Hawke followed, but tossed the robe across a chair on the way, having no intention of being clothed. She interrupted Anders' process of drying his long hair by insinuating herself between his knees, her thighs pressed to the bed, and when he looked at her, his eyes were on a level with her chest. He raised an eyebrow, and she gave him her best, cat-like smile.

“Aren't you tired?” he mumbled, but the tip of his tongue passed across his lips, moistening them, and one corner turned up, gazing at her from beneath long eyelashes.

“Not _that_ tired,” Hawke said, and pulled the robe out of his hand, dropping it behind her on the floor. “I need your hands, in numerous places.”

Surprisingly, the look of desire was erased then, replaced by a beetled brow and a frown. His eyes roved her body in another way, a clinical coldness that she recognized as The Healer. “Turn around,” he said.

“Anders, I'm fine,” she sighed. She wasn't, but she didn't care at the moment. All she wanted was for him to make her forget it.

His hands closed on her hips, grip iron, and he was fighting her refusal to let him worry about her. “Do what I tell you to do,” he growled, glowering at her.

Hawke raised both eyebrows. “Ohhh... is that how it is? I could enjoy … Ow!” He'd pinched her, not hard, but hard enough to shut her up.

“Turn. Around.”

Marian sighed dramatically, rubbing the spot where he'd pinched her, and pirouetted slowly so that her back was to him. “You like this angle better, huh? I can be accommodating.” She couldn't help herself, and he snorted. Then he sighed, and she felt his fingers on the wound in her back where the Templar had driven a blade through her. The wound that should have killed her, if not for this man.

She felt him lean forward, and his forehead was against her skin. His foot was pressed gently against her calf, left hand wrapped around her thigh, as though he simply wanted as many points of contact between them as he could achieve. The fingers that had brushed the wound on her back then became a palm, covering it, and he remained that way long enough that Marian stirred, intending to turn again to question him, but the hand on her thigh tightened, nails scoring the skin, and then not a moment later, a feeling to which she had nothing to compare flooded through her.

It began as heat, an imprint of his palm on her back, radiating slowly through the stiff muscles, sliding like oil on water up her back, languid, tickling her spine all the way to her neck. Then the sensation flowed _inward_ , permeating her core, filling her, replacing all feeling with an effusive, organic flush. It was like... being suffused with light, from the inside. She lost all sense of his hands, as though she was floating somewhere beyond him, and her vision swam with color, blurred, breathing slowed.

And then it was gone, and her knees were liquid, and she might have fallen, but his arms were around her waist, and he pulled her back onto the bed, between his legs. He held her, and for a moment her head lolled against his shoulder and she could only blink, quivering.

“Andraste's ass, Anders,” she finally managed to say around her thudding heart. “To the void with your Darktown clinic. You should take up a room at the Blooming Rose and charge a king's ransom for that.”

She was rewarded with a sharp bark of surprised laughter, his chest vibrating against hers. “Feel better?” he purred in her ear.

Hawke opened her mouth to tell him she might never have felt better in her whole life, but then bit down on her bottom lip. “Well...” she muttered, affecting a strained tone. “I think you missed something, actually.”

Anders ran his hand down her arm, craning his neck over her shoulder where she leaned against him, studying her, his hair falling around his face, still damp. “What else hurts?” he asked, a frown in his voice. “I thought I ...”

He didn't finish, because Hawke angled her arms behind her, finding his torso with both hands, and shoved him back. He wasn't expecting it, and so he fell in startled, unwilling compliance onto the thick quilt. Hawke pivoted on the knee that now felt no pain whatsoever, planting them both on either side of his hips, and smirked down at him.

Anders' eyes were wide for a moment, then rolled upward toward the ceiling as he rubbed a hand over his face, which bore a long-suffering glower that failed not to be equally amused. Hawke noticed that he also looked terribly tired, and that the power he'd just poured into healing her had done nothing for him. His face was still bruised where the Templar had struck him, his lip still swollen and cracked. The playful expression on her face faded while he was not looking, and words were on her tongue, choking her.

_I love you Anders. I love you enough to die for you. A thousand times._

Then his eyes were on her again, and she forced herself to smile, even if it had lost some of its humor. She said nothing, but leaned down and brushed his lips with her own, very softly, tongue tracing their outline, and then his hands were in her hair, his tongue in her mouth, hot. She pressed her hips down against his, rotating them slowly, feeling him stir beneath her, wanting her, and he made a deep, groaning noise into her mouth. Hands slid up her thighs, kneading the muscles deeply, finding her hips and pulling her hard against him. His cock was just there, magnifying the ache between her legs, the only need of her body that he had not alleviated.

Marian's lips moved from his, trailing down his jaw to his neck, as he craned his head back, eyes closed, and as she kissed his collarbone, touching it with her tongue, he arched his back like a cat, fingernails scoring her hips. Hawke shifted, sliding up along him, then shifted back, and the head of his cock was inside her.

Anders had other ideas, however, for before she could adjust to him, the hands on her hips pulled her forward roughly, then he pushed her off him, and almost the moment she fell to her back, he had twisted about and was crouched over her, hands on either side of her chest, body between her legs. She wrapped them about him roughly, pulling his hips close to hers, trying to writhe in such a way that she could have him, but he moved with her, denying her.

His lips were on her neck, and his burning tongue, and then he was tasting the skin along her chest, sucking gently at her nipple, then grazing it with his teeth, softly at first, until the fingernails Hawke dug into his shoulder inspired sharp pressure, just shy of pain. _The way she liked it._

She wrapped her fingers around his upper arms, pulling, wanting his body against hers, and he resisted her until she growled his name, and then he flashed her that drugged, half-lidded smirk that turned her blood to fire. He moved slowly, hands crawling alongside her body until his face was level with hers, and he bent, kissing her throat, then her ear, and then his hips shifted, deftly, and she was depressed into the bed as he pushed himself fully inside her, striking that bundle of nerves that sent pleasure radiating through her. It tore a startled cry from her lips, for he was usually slow about it, and he made a sound in her ear that was both pleasure and low laughter.

He did not move again inside her for a moment, as he positioned his body against hers, elbows above her shoulders. He slid his fingers into her hair, pressing it back from her face, looking at her. Hawke dug her heel into the back of his thigh, impatient, but he ignored her. Instead, he caressed her nose with his own, brushed his lips against her cheek, her chin, and his expression was sentimental, thoughtful, even if his eyes were dark with lust.

“I cannot stand to lose you,” he whispered then.

Hawke felt her expression soften, but masked it again quickly with a fiercely raised eyebrow, and pressed both heels into his thighs, pulling hard. “You're going about it all the wrong way, sweetheart,” she growled.

He smiled, touching his tongue to his lips, between his teeth, then he bent and drawled in her ear, in a slow whisper “Oh?”

Hawke opened her mouth to explain, but then the hands that were in her hair shoved through it hard, and the fingers tightened, pulling her entire head back, and he snapped his hips, thrusting hard into her. Her words caught in her throat, devolving into a gasp, and then a groan of pleasure as he gave her exactly what he knew she wanted.

 

* * *

 

It was much later, and though the curtains were drawn against the rising sun, smudged gray light crept along the edges. The fire was mostly embers, just a temperate smolder reflecting lazily upon the empty copper tub, the metal dancing like something alive. Marian watched it, easily hypnotized as though drugged. Anders was curled beside her, facing away, nestled into the curve of her arm, face hidden by his long hair. He breathed deeply, peacefully, having fallen into exhausted sleep mere moments after his own climax.

She brushed his hair out of his eyes carefully, not wanting to wake him, consumed with a sensation as though this man had suffused her entire being. Not only his body, his seed, but his soul, for it was that which he had poured into her – his essence, his being, mending what was wounded. And not just her body.

It was a secret, her own dark secret that sometimes haunted her wakeful, lonely hours, that violence and physical pain was a reflection of something deeper. Something withered and sick permeating her very soul. A lost childhood, a home destroyed in a Blight, the deaths of loved ones for which she had never shed tears, the terrible, choking power of feeling that she warred against with her whole being. 

Marian pulled her hand away, because suddenly it trembled, and she curled it into a fist. She sank into the mattress, allowing herself to mold her body along his, and let herself savor his warmth. She lay there a long time, not thinking, and listening to him breathe. At last, she closed her eyes, her chin at his shoulder, lips against the back of his neck. Before she drifted away, she whispered it softly, for herself, to know what it sounded like to say aloud. _“I love you.”_

She was gone then, faded into something dreamless, and so she did not see him smile.

 


	8. Chapter 8

 

Sunrises came and went, and sometimes muddled midnights dragged up out of formless nightmares, and through all of it, waking up with Anders in her bed was still strange, but she never said that to him again. The thing she'd whispered to herself, the feeling she had, she never voiced again either, but she wondered if he knew. He told her in many ways, for it seemed to come easily to his tongue. There was the laughing way he said it when she was being facetious or irreverent, and the worried way it proceeded his disapproval of her casual approach to the myriad perils of her occupation. Then there was the way he whispered it to her when nothing separated them but sweat and skin, when the word was thick, visceral, primal. That was how it resonated most in Marian Hawke's soul. There was an impoverished part of her that needed to hear it, and she would drag it out of him with the stroke of her fingers, the caress of her lips, the adulation of her body.

Marian began to notice many things about Anders that seemed to only belong to her. “ _I see the way that Anders fellow looks at you,”_ her mother had remarked wistfully one afternoon, and afterward, Hawke noticed also. It wasn't like Fenris had looked at her: a lustful smirk with only fire in the green eyes. She had nothing else to compare it to, she realized, except perhaps if one could say it was analogous to madness. Anders had once made the statement that he would drown them both in blood to keep her safe, and that was the way he looked at her. She understood it, because she had waded through it herself for half her life to keep safe those she loved. Doing whatever it took. The _madness_ was the disconnect to the macrocosm of civilized society: the way a Templar's life, dreams and purpose could become crushed into a negligible and compact eviction of regard. Dismissed. She wondered sometimes if Anders felt the hollow. The empty place where such governing regard for all life should be. He had his clinic, the patients he drained himself to the brink for. What did Marian have beyond her mother, beyond Bethany, Varric? _Anders_.

As days passed, she noticed that she made Anders laugh, when others only inspired a smart quip or his trademark irritable snark. And she made him smile. It was not just this, she guessed, that was the indicator for their crew that there was more than just a business relationship between the two of them, but the fact that Marian smiled back, and that more of her jokes were for him. Maybe there was more than that, too, that others could see.

Anders did not speak of the Mage underground to her again after the incident that had almost led to her death, and she knew he felt guilty about it, and was trying to protect her. Hawke didn't need protecting, as far as she was concerned, so when others in the city pegged her for a mage sympathizer for her actions and asked for her help, she stepped out on the proverbial limb for not only something she felt strongly about, but to show him he couldn't dictate her actions. He was argumentative to a point, but he was as driven as she was.

 

And somewhere in this process, Justice stopped disapproving of her.

 

“If you can find the Templar that was responsible, and perhaps … expose the evidence...” the woman before them was saying, “we would be most in your debt.”

It was a morning perhaps a month after their escape from the Gallows. They had returned only days before from smuggling Bethany out of Kirkwall and seeing her safely to Amaranthine, where a friend of Anders' was looking after her well-being in a more inconvenient place for her to be tracked by Templars. From what Hawke gathered, the mage underground was as well established in Ferelden as it was in Kirkwall, and Anders had promised her that his contacts would know well ahead of time if anyone came looking for her, and move her. But for now, there were no letters, and Hawke was left with a ravenous appetite for harrying any potential pursuers.

“And this evidence?” Hawke was asking. The woman, a mage sympathizer that kept vigil in a corner beneath the awning of a tailor's shop in Lowtown, pursed her lips and raised an eyebrow.

“Oh, you know. The damning kind.” She dusted her fingernails against her shift and looked at them with nonchalance, her expression revealing a lack of shame at her suggestion. _Find something, and plant it. Right._

Aveline interjected then, her voice lifted an octave in her traditional tone of protestation. “If we _find_ evidence, then the city guard can certainly...”

Both Hawke and Anders spoke at once in that moment, standing side by side. “The city guard never...” the mage began, as Marian said “We know he's guilty...”

Aveline's lips remained open, looking between them both, and Varric was snorting, eyes rolling toward the sky. The guard captain's teeth clicked together and her brows shot into a point over her nose, and then she opened her mouth to speak again when abruptly, queerly, Anders burst into incongruous laughter, bringing all eyes to him.

He quelled his mirth quickly, rubbing his fingers along the stubble of his jaw as though working the amusement out of his face, but he was smiling still.

“Cracking up completely now, Blondie?” Varric quipped, his thick shoulders rolling back to adjust the weight of Bianca.

“Um..” Anders glanced sideways at Mistress Selby, who was likewise regarding him with curiosity. “It's only that Jus...um...my friend...has developed a bit of... uh...esteem. For Hawke.” His slanted eyes shifted to Marian, widening in communication of a startled personal entertainment.

“Maker preserve us,” Varric grumbled. “That's just what we need.”

“Your friend?” Aveline asked, slow on the uptake for the moment, as she was likely still in mental arms about the idea of framing a Templar for a crime he was too good at committing to be caught at. Or for circumventing the less than adroit city guard.

Anders gaped at her, but Hawke derailed the entire, awkward exchange by leaning into the mage, pressing her cheek alongside his, and her lips to his ear, where she said in a low, teasing complaint: “Took you long enough, you hardass."

Anders pulled his head to the side. “Don't tease,” he snapped, but he was grinning, rubbing his forehead.

“What...” Aveline began, but again, Hawke interrupted her, speaking now to Mistress Selby. “We'll get it done, one way or the other.”

Mistress Selby nodded, shoulders relaxing, and seemed disinterested in the exchange that had just taken place. She reached behind her and drew a small, worn purse from beneath a stack of copied documents that Hawke recognized as reproductions of a certain mage's manifesto. She felt a pang of admiration for him, and fondness at the memories of him lying in bed with his head in her lap while she sharpened a dagger, he holding an original with ink-stained fingers, musing aloud.

Hawke found the purse being thrust at her, but she drew her own arm into her chest rather than extend a hand to retrieve it.

“Several of us pooled what we had together, as a reward...” Mistress Selby began, but trailed off as Hawke shook her head.

“Find another use for it. I have no need of coin.”

To her credit, the woman didn't argue, and dropped the pouch behind her once more, shifting papers over it again. “Maker watch over you, serah,” she said.

They left as a group, Varric and Aveline in the lead, far enough away that they didn't hear Anders as he walked beside Hawke, his fingers brushing hers and remaining there for the space of time it took him to say, with admiration and respect, “Have I ever told you I love you?”

 

In the end, they did not have to work to frame the Templar, for if Marian Hawke was good at anything, it was being in the right place at the right time. The man, for all practical purposes, hanged himself, and Aveline was perfectly pleased to take him into legal custody, and even deigned to join them later at their favorite haunt for a drink in celebration.

Several rounds had passed about, and only Anders was abstaining, having grumbled that Justice never really let him get drunk anymore, but Marian suspected that he was afraid of not being in full possession of his faculties given the recent debacle that had cost the life of a fellow mage, and almost their own. There was also the factor that somewhere in the chain of things regarding the mage underground, there was a rat, but he was blissfully unaware that Marian had diverted a sizable sum to her contacts in the Red Iron to keeping an eye on him. His clinic was guarded, night and day, and it was honestly disturbing, but elucidating, to Marian that he did not realize he was followed almost everywhere he went by mercenaries she paid to protect him. It did not behoove her to reveal that, however, for she wanted neither his objection nor his gratitude.

While Anders was not drinking, Fenris seemed to be having the mage's share on his behalf. The elf had drained a bottle of wine on his own, and while Hawke was aware of his tolerance for the substance, the second bottle and the shot of whiskey seemed to be getting the better of him. His black brows scored a hard, dark line over his green eyes, which were narrowed, and glaring at the hand that curled around the bottle on the table. He had said almost nothing the entire night, and Hawke suspected he was upset with her for what he'd heard of her foray into the Gallows, and her seemingly recent obsession with mage rights. He'd pointedly avoided working with them for weeks, and he'd even begun skipping their weekly games of Wicked Grace.

The group had gradually shifted their usual sprawl at the table. Now that Anders joined them regularly, Fenris had absconded to the other side of the long, scarred rectangular surface, when he appeared at all. Isabela was beside him, but even her well-honed wiles did not raise him from his sour brooding. Marian thought she understood his distaste for mages, even though empathy was not her strong suit, but she thought that he had given up some of that after the death of Danarius, and her words to convince him to allow Verania to go free. In truth, had the elven woman not been Fenris' sister, Hawke might have slit her throat herself, but the one thing that resonated most with Marian was that family was sometimes all one had. They were not always a choice, and not always blood kin, but they belonged to a person. Varric was her brother, would always be. Fenris was. Anders was … _her blood._

Even now, Anders sat beside her, his posture relaxed. His chin was perched upon the heel of his palm, and he was studying empty space, his expression not vacant, but removed. She thought of what he'd said earlier in the morning, as they baked in the sun of Lowtown, about Justice having developed “ _esteem”_ for her. She still did not understand that part of him. He claimed that he and Justice were “one,” and in some ways she saw that dichotomy. Anders was a healer, and also a killer. Justice had not shown from his veins the night he'd set a Templar afire. But she had felt Justice's hands upon her, his lips crushing hers, his energy enveloping her, and knew it was not true. And despite Anders' insistence upon the intertwining nature of the union, he still spoke of the spirit as a separate entity.

She glanced at him, thinking of this, and at that moment, he looked back at her. His eyes seemed to withdraw from another realm, and focused on her own, and he smiled, the expression lending a light to his irises, like whiskey in fine crystal. She felt a hand touch her leg, his, and of its own accord, her thigh moved toward his, so that their knees touched. He tilted his chin in his palm, only a subtle gesture, seemingly natural, and the pressure of his fingers on her thigh steered her to him, his gaze a beacon, just so, and she found herself leaning toward him. Their lips connected, her eyes slipping closed, air pausing in her lungs to savor the connection, and it allowed her preternatural senses to register that everything around them went silent. Familiar voices at their table became just the distant cacophony of unknown patrons, the shuffling of footsteps, a door closing, something metal hitting wood.

 

Hawke gathered the meaning of the silence, and Anders' lack of recognition was transferred from the soft tender touch of his lips, the way they curled in a smile when they met hers, the way his hand slipped deeper into the space between her thighs. Loving, paying no attention to the fact that they had just torn down whatever veil that disguised their personal affairs. In response to that deafening silence, Hawke pressed her lips closer to his, touched her teeth to his bottom lip, and then let one hand trail through his hair. _Let them see._

“Have the two of you no shame?” The voice was deep, gravelly, and just a bit that side of drunk. Hawke parted from Anders, who then seemed to suddenly remember himself, and she saw him glance about a bit furtively. Marian's eyes connected with Fenris's, and she frowned at him, not understanding.

Isabela inhaled deeply, her chest rising, and she tipped a bottle of whiskey over a glass, shoving it toward Fenris with one finger. She leaned into him from the side, shoulder nudging his. “You said you'd match me,” she offered cheerily. “You're down one!”

Fenris said nothing, continuing to glare at Hawke, and then he snatched the glass Isabela had poured between two fingers, and shoved it across the table at Anders.

“Have a drink on me, mage. You've a talent for nearly getting people killed that you should celebrate.”

Anders, for once, did not have an easy retort for the elf. His eyes flicked from Fenris, to the glass of liquor, which he did not touch, to Marian, but rested on her only briefly. Around the table, their friends were watching the exchange – and them – with varied expressions. Aveline's jaw was open, a cup of beer arrested halfway to her lips, for whatever nuances others had picked up on between Hawke and their healer, she apparently had not. Merrill was leaning into Varric's shoulder, her delicate hands steepled together before her lips, not hiding the ear to pointed ear smile. Her eyes were luminous and wide. Varric's brow was furrowed in an expression that betrayed no surprise, but that Hawke knew well enough; it was a mixture of concern, and disapproval. Isabela was avoiding looking at them at all, but was watching Fenris carefully, in much the same way that Hawke was now staring at him.

Marian suddenly smiled, and with deft fingers, plucked the glass of whiskey from the table. “If anyone should drink for having a talent for getting people killed, it should be me,” she quipped and downed the shot with a toss of her head. She let the empty glass clatter back to the table between she and the elf, and had successfully drawn his attention away from Anders. She gave him a small smile that she certainly did not feel reach her eyes, and judging from the twitch of his lips, Fenris did not see it there either.

Anders had shifted his chair back, and there was a brush of color across his aquiline nose. “Perhaps I should go,” he murmured. Fenris' attention snapped back to him immediately.

“Yes, perhaps you should,” he growled.

“Now, now, boys,” Varric said, mouth finely unhinging, though his usual humor was a bit strained. Wary. “No need to ruin a perfectly good day.”

Anders stood up, however, glancing apologetically at Hawke. “It's fine,” he said quietly. “I'll go.”

Hawke had grown immediately tired of this evening, and pushed her chair back also. “I'll go with you then,” she said, but before she could stand up, Anders hand was on her shoulder, holding her down.

“Stay, Marian,” he said, and his voice was _asking_ her to do so.

Obstinately, and because no-one was driving her mage off for any reason on her watch, Marian simply closed her fingers over his like a vice and pulled them off her shoulder, but kept them secure in her palm as she stood up.

“Honestly,” she said cheerfully. “I find myself quite... tired.” She directed that last word at Fenris, then released Anders' hand and walked out of The Hanged Man without looking back at any of them. She stepped into the open air of Lowtown, only slightly less fetid than the interior of the dive, and was jostled by another patron exiting the building. She found that her heart was thudding dully, adrenaline shifting lazily through her veins, a build up arrested by her abrupt departure from the antagonistic elf.

Anders appeared at her side then, and met her eyes sheepishly. “You didn't have to leave,” he mumbled.

“What on Andraste's flaming pyre is the matter with him lately?” Marian griped in answer. “He's had more than a month to get over what happened at the Gallows. It's not like...”

“...Marian...” Anders interrupted, and he was laughing, which made so little sense at that moment that Hawke stopped speaking, and then grumbled: “What?!”

Anders stretched out a hand and brushed the backs of his fingers over her cheekbone. “You can be so perfectly clueless sometimes,” he said softly, fondly, with a smile touching his lips. “He's jealous.”

“Jealous?” Marian snapped. “Of what?”

The mage's eyes widened, and for a moment he looked unsure, his hand dropping away from her face. “Of...me,” he said at last. “He … cares for you. I believe that before, the two of you were ...” Now he broke off, merely raising an eyebrow.

It sank in then, and Hawke blew an exasperated breath into the late fall air. It was chilly out, and it turned to vapor. “The two of us shared a bed, on occasion,” she admitted. “That was all.”

Anders regarded her quietly for a moment, and then they were forced to step to the side as the door to the bar swung open and several guests crowded past. Marian was shuffled closer to Anders, and instinctively, the mage slid his arm around her waist, holding her close to him. “Well,” he said, almost in her ear. “You should have told _him_ that, perhaps.”

She did not pull away from his half-embrace, savoring instead the warmth of it. “Why can I read people I don't know like open books, and not notice the things that are right in front of me?”

Anders dipped his head down, nose against her cheekbone, lips against her ear. “Took you three years to notice me...” he teased.

Hawke smiled then, and turned her body so that she was facing the mage. The arm around her waist became a hand on her hip, and she flashed him her most bedeviling smile, complete with limpid blue eyes that looked up demurely from beneath her long black lashes. It was an expression that turned most men mute, and it had no less effect on Anders. She tucked her arms around his waist, the leather of his coat absorbing the chill of the night air, and held him entranced for a moment.

“Three years, huh?” she purred. “I would say... it was much closer to three minutes. One day in Darktown, looking for this mysterious Gray Warden...” She enjoyed the way his eyes softened, realizing what she was admitting, and she allowed her smile to take on a genuine quality, rather than that of a consummate actress. “Although,” she added, maintaining the lightness of the moment, “I do recall you tried your very best to appear … unappetizing.”

He laughed at that, his head tilting back, and when he looked at her again, his forehead touched hers, and his eyes sparkled in the moonlight and the glow from beyond the tavern door. “Unappetizing?” he repeated. “I must have done a good job of it, then.”

Hawke tilted her chin up and caught his bottom lip in her teeth, and said “Nope,” making him laugh again, which he stifled with a kiss.

When their lips parted, he held her close, and mumbled softly. “Thank you.”

“For what?” His warm breath tickled her nose in a cloud of vapor.

“For you,” he answered. “For lo...for caring about me. I've never had anyone.” He kissed her forehead now. “Not like this.”

Hawke stepped back from him, for even after three years of caring for him, and a month of knowing she was in love with him, she still recoiled from those moments when she felt compelled to say it. They seemed to be more often, these days. Instead, she forced herself to take his hand, and twine her fingers through his, something she saw other couples do when out for an evening stroll.

“You may show your gratitude by offering your protection to a defenseless lady on her way home,” she teased.

Anders snorted, looking over his shoulder at the streets of Lowtown. “Right. Let's find one.”

That brought genuine laughter to Hawke's lips, the way no one but perhaps Varric did. She started walking, tugging Anders after her. She could feel his smile, like sunlight at her shoulder. They walked home, holding hands, and let themselves in to the High Town mansion. It was late, and the fires were almost embers, and as they went up to bed, neither of them noticed the white lilies upon the table.

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It would be remiss if I did not mention that I was somewhat inspired toward the scene in the Hanged Man by a similar incident in the story Triaxial, by the lovely Fusrodoodles, which you should read if you enjoy this pair. I hoped to have made it my own, even if the setting and the accidental kiss seemed such a perfect scenario I could not really imagine a better one.


	9. Chapter 9

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This was originally going to be one chapter from two perspectives, but I decided it didn't work. Instead of one 5k word chapter, you'll get two. This has been hard for me write, and the next one will be a little more so. I will churn it out ASAP. Love you guys.

There was no way for Anders to describe what he was seeing in words that made sense, that elucidated the true depths of the pure odium and revulsion it dragged up from the very base of his soul. These repugnant sensations vied sharply in magnitude and primacy with the profound sorrow and anguished compassion he felt for Marian.

She knelt upon floor of the old foundry, knees drawn haphazardly beneath her, and cradled in her arms was the figure that had once been many women, including her mother, who had been drawn and quartered together into an anathema of humanity. A shrine to both human pain and the sway it held over vulnerability and corruption. Leandra, or what had been Leandra, lay stretched upon the ground, one arm limp across her chest. One of Hawke's hands was upon her cheek, and the other was clutching her mother's hand, but Leandra was gone. Had been.

None of them knew what to do. What to say. That much was clear, for they all stood there, dumbly. They were surrounded by the detritus of the battle that had been so recently waged – the still smoldering embers of deanimated skeletons, the body of Gascard DuPuis, a lance through his chest, ash that shifted softly upon an invisible, heated breeze. A residue still hung in the air - both the heavy, copper-tainted slag of blood-magic, and the undiluted mana of Anders' own magic. To his own eyes, it left a faint coruscation of blue upon the smog that overlay the carnage.

“And you wonder why people fear mages,” a voice near his left shoulder snarled, almost too low to hear.

Anders said nothing to Fenris, and felt a look of hurt cross his own face. He could not argue with the elf, for once, and that was nauseating.

Marian looked up then, and for a moment, he thought that she had heard Fenris, but her eyes found Anders instead, and the crushed way she said his name broke his heart. “Help her,” she croaked.

He couldn't. He knew there was nothing he could do, but he couldn't make himself say it. He knelt beside the body, a patchwork quilt of madness, dropping his staff at his side. He was weak already, feeling that pull deep in his bones that said he was near his limit, but he brought his hand to Leandra's face. There had likely been no warmth there before, and there was certainly none there now – the sordid ritual that had created this travesty had wreaked irreversible damage, but because he loved Hawke, he went through the motions of making an effort.

His eyes were slits, and he couldn't look at Marian or at the face before him, the face of the kind woman who had greeted him every morning of the recent weeks he'd lived with Hawke. Anders turned his gaze inward, dredging out what parts of him could sense the patterns wrought here, the damage done, and then...

…he jerked his fingers away, leaned to his right while planting his hand on the ground to steady himself, then doubled over and lost the negligible contents of his stomach. He tried to tuck his head away, twisting at the waist and hiding his reaction by shadowing his face with his left hand and hunching his shoulders, but it was obvious enough, he knew. He waited until the tremor left his shoulders, then he scrubbed his sleeve across his lips, and turned back to Marian, a shimmer of moisture misting his vision.

He saw her eyes shift from rounded orbs into something flat, for they held what little hope she might have had, invested in him.

“I'm so sorry, Marian,” he muttered raggedly, and the admission that he could do nothing for her, his protector, his lover, was like a blade in chest, serrated and dull.

She said nothing in reply, but looked away from him after long seconds, back to her mother's face. One hand, spattered in blood, stroked her mother's face, fingers curling around the veil that the blood-mage had placed upon her, and she tugged it free with a vicious snap of her wrist. Then she smoothed the hair into place gently. Anders waited for some emotion, any, but there was nothing. Finally, she eased Leandra's lifeless body fully to the ground at her knee, and stood.

Hawke spoke no words, and did not look up for a long moment. Then she turned, angling her body toward the door that led into Lowtown, and she began walking. The two long daggers that were practically extensions of herself lay where she had dropped them when her mother had collapsed into her arms. Anders stood himself to follow her, but he found a hand on his arm. He looked down into Varric's face, drawn in more sorrow than he'd ever imagined would be reflected in the dwarf's face.

“Let her go, Blondie.”

_Let her go._ How was he supposed to do that? Every fiber of his being longed to close the space between them, to hold her, to tell her … what? What did a person who'd never had anything, anyone, say to someone that had suffered such loss?  _“I know how you feel,”_ didn't cut it. He had no idea, and he knew it. The hand on his arm squeezed gently, just above the elbow, and Varric's brown eyes squinted meaningfully, with perhaps as much hurt as Anders himself felt, in his own way. The mage finally nodded shortly, and felt his shoulders slump, weariness like a weight of stone falling about him. He sucked in a dry breath, the aroma of decay and burnt flesh cloying and making him gag, then cough.

He nevertheless turned back to the body at his feet, drooping over it. “We should...” he began, then began to bend at the knees, meaning to gather Leandra into his arms, to take her body from this place, where it did not belong. Before he could complete the motion, however, Fenris had taken two long strides from his haunt behind Varric, and dropped lithely on his bare feet. Fluidly, Hawke's mother was in his grasp, lifted from the floor.

“Let us do this,” he said, his voice dark.

 

-ooo-

 

It was later that evening, and Anders had been fending away visitors from the mansion that now only he and Marian shared, with the exception of Bodahn and Sandal. News had spread through their small circle quickly, and Gamlen had been the first to arrive. Marian's reaction to him had been so severe, so full of rage that there was yet a vase on the floor beside the front door that Anders had only time to scoop up with his foot into a pile by the wall. After that, she had gone down into the cellar where Fenris had lain all that remained of Leandra Amell Hawke upon a table.

Anders shut the door wearily after Merrill, and felt much worse for the wear, for the diminutive elf had genuine tears in her eyes that almost dragged Anders' own to the surface, and he'd had to gently explain for the fifth time to various acquaintances that now was, simply put, not a good time. He slumped against the heavy wooden edifice, and sighed, a slow whistling breath from his nostrils. It was true that this task could have been given over to Bodahn, but Anders did not want to risk the very real possibility of the dwarf not having the gumption to avoid being walked over by such as Aveline when she wished to have her way, whereas Anders managed to serve as a believable bulwark. Secondly, he was apprehensive himself, discomposed by Marian's unnerving mixture of detachment and furor. He needed to go to her, he knew, but he still had no idea what to say.

He remained frozen, an extension of the door, for a long moment, staring into the fireplace which Bodahn had built up into a roaring blaze. It seemed a thousand candles had been lit, to ward away that which could not be put aside. They glittered along the staircase and framed the banister, candelabra gracing the corners of the room to scatter the shadows. At last, he peeled himself away, unpinning the chain that clasped his feathered pauldrons together. They were not heavy, the feathers a possession he prized for their magical properties, but tonight they felt as though they bore the weight of a Deep Road tunnel, miles of rock above his feet. He laid them upon a table, and sluggishly shrugged out of his coat afterward, piling the ratted garment with less care beside the pauldrons. He stretched his arms behind him, trying to relieve the aching muscles, and found himself dreaming foggily of Marian's strong hands working the tension loose, as she often did. Then he instantly felt poorly for the thought.

He dropped his arms to the side, and took a step toward the stairs leading to the cellar before a belated thought inspired him to turn and bolt the door. He caught Bodhan's eye as he did so, for the dwarf sat silently by the fire with Sandal.

“No more visitors tonight, please,” he asked quietly, feeling strangely enough about giving orders in Marian's home, even if ostensibly he did live here now. “Just... ignore anyone that knocks.”

Bodahn nodded, and seemed grateful at the suggestion.

He took the stairs into the cellar, and found Marian exactly where he had left her earlier, having coaxed her downstairs and seen her settled after the fiasco with Gamlen. She occupied a single, makeshift chair; a barrel stood beside a crate upon which small candelabra stood, wax dripping down the wrought iron frame like a slow marker of time passed. Leandra was upon the table Varric had cleared, and was draped with a sheet, nothing of her exposed beyond the form, and even that, Anders knew with a shiver along his spine, was not Leandra.

Hawke did not look up at his entrance. She sat forward on the barrel, her elbows on her knees, and because he knew her body so well, he could almost feel the tightness along the insides of her shoulder blades. The knots. Her neck was align with her spinal column, and her eyes were trained ahead, though they were drowned in the shadow of the room. Her pallor had deepened, leaving her but a wraith.

“Marian?” He meant to speak clearly, but it came out as a hoarse whisper, and she did not look up. He hovered in the doorway, trying to ignore the phantom upon the table, even though the cloth that covered her seemed to gain incongruous brilliance in the dim candlelight.

Anders moved, though finding it a reluctant effort as much as it was one born of deep longing to be near her. He'd watched Gamlen reach out to touch her arm, and seen her fist connect with his chin. He was not sure what part of her blamed her uncle for this, for she'd said nothing but to tell him to get out. In part, he feared that if touched her, he would find himself the source of her ire. A mage, as had been the man responsible. A mage, unable to salvage anything of her loved one. Inadequate.

He was drawn to her, inexorably, however, and so he was within inches when he found his long fingers brushing her shoulder. She did not flinch from him, and so he carefully trailed his fingertips up the back of her neck to her hair, brushing it back from her face. Her skin felt clammy where he grazed it.

“My love?” he whispered then, and the words came out full of trepidation. She still said nothing, moved not a muscle, and finally, he added, brokenly, meaning it, “ I'm so sorry. I'm here for you. Anything you need...” It trailed off. _Talk to me! Touch me! Let me help you!_ His mind screamed these things, but his lips voiced none of them.

Then, finally, the sound of her voice broke the lingering silence, but it was a mere hoarse rasp, as dim as the light. “One thing. It was all there ever was for me to do. Just one thing.”

Anders' hand was resting against the back of her neck now, and he pressed his fingers into the skin, silently telling her he was listening. He did not want to speak, lest he say the wrong thing. At last, she continued.

“ _Just keep them safe, Marian_. My father asked me for one thing before he died. One thing in his whole life. And I cannot do even that.”

Anders stepped closer to her, as close as he dared, and shifted his arm so that it was around her, gripping her shoulder so that he could pull her against his hip. She let him absently, as though she had not noticed.  _You're not the Maker, Marian. You are only one person. That is no promise for a child to make._ Instead of saying any of this, he merely squeezed her shoulder.

Hawke stared at the remains of her mother, having never looked at him, until she moved away, shrugging the limb he clutched to fend him off.

“You should go, Anders. Before you end up this way.”

He made a sound this time, a choked cough that he inhaled instead of exhaled, then huffed out, roughly: “You aren't responsible for me, Marian.”

She did look at him now, her forehead crinkling into shadows, her eyes unreadable slits. “By now,” she breathed, “... if you don't...” Then she was shaking her head, and she stood up, ridding herself of his half embrace. “Just go,” she said, and it was as broken as he'd ever heard her sound.

Anders took a step toward her, and she actually backed away, pressing her back along the wall, with the barrel between them.

“Don't,” she hissed.

He searched the way the candlelight played in the clear blue and white of her eyes, but there was no moisture. No tears.  _How? How could there not be?_

For a moment, he thought perhaps the right thing to do was to ignore this plea, to refuse to leave her. To go to her despite her protestation and take her in his arms and tell her he would be with her no matter what. But again, he heard the vase smash against the wall earlier, and the raw sound of her fury rising against what was left of her family, and he saw the angry lines that her body struck now. She was like a cat, abused and cornered, and not to be whispered into stillness.

And so he backed away, dragging his shoulder against the wall to stay afloat in this nightmare, until he felt the emptiness of the doorway behind him. She held his gaze the entire time, challenge in her posture, claws out that dug into his heart. 

There was nothing he could do to help her.

_What could he do?_

“I'm sorry, Marian,” he repeated at last, and he was. “I will always be here for you, if you ...”

She looked away from him sharply, arms crossed, back arrow-straight. He sucked in a labored sigh, and faded through the door. 

Every step away from her felt like eternity. Dragging, dark, and empty, and with no light to guide him back. 

 

 


	10. Chapter 10

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This might be my favorite chapter I've written of any story I've ever written. Hope you all enjoy.

The passage of time after Anders retreated became a blended, melted blur. Hawke remained with her mother's body for hours, eventually joined by her Mabari, Jess, who provided a solid warm bulk of silence. At some point, Marian dredged a bottle of wine from their stores, which managed to turn into three bottles through the miraculous magic of indiscretion, and after that, there was nothing. 

Rather than awakening on the cold slab of the cellar, in the dark, she awoke with a piercing headache in her bed, made worse by the slant of shameless sunlight that peeked through curtains not fully drawn. Marian groaned, squeezing her eyes shut, and she rolled over. She stretched her arm out with recently ingrained instinct, and her fingers splayed upon soft, cold sheets. 

Eyelids fluttered open again, and she found herself staring at an empty bed, an expanse of carefully tucked blanket and a pillow bearing no indention of having been slept on. She realized how accustomed she'd grown to Anders being beside her, even if he always seemed strange and new and somehow dangerously transient. She was used to those few moments of watching him sleep, for she always woke first, being never far beneath the mantle of sleep. He looked years younger at rest, cares and strain washed away, cheeks flushed in relaxation, hair awry. If his arms were not around her, he kept the blanket curled in his fingers, tucked over his shoulders and wound beneath his chin, as though trying to keep it from slipping away. 

Hawke was wondering briefly where he was, and opened her mouth to voice his name into the room, when all of it hit her.

It was like a tunnel collapsing on top of her, earth and rock showering down from the ceiling and blocking out the air and the light, falling on her head, her shoulders, her chest, so heavy she could not even scream for help. Her fingers gripped the sheets that covered her, but her fingernails bit into her palm through the fabric, and blood rushed through her veins with such ferocity that her head pounded. Her mouth was dry. Her heart was hot iron between an anvil and a hammer, every pulse an aching pain. 

 _Her mother._  Her mother was dead. In pieces. Ripped apart by a blood mage desperate to piece together a lost love, heedless of the lives he destroyed.  _Too late_. Marian had been too late. Just like she had been too late to throw herself between her foolish brother and that ogre. 

For one blissful second, she had forgotten. 

 

Hawke pressed her face into the pillow, not even breathing. Her head pounded, both from the barely stymied rage and the wicked hang-over. Her lips were dry, and the bottom one was cracked. How it had gotten that way, she wasn't sure, but she had a vague memory of falling at some point the night before. Of glass breaking. She had no memory of how she came to be back in her room, in her bed, but there was honestly only one explanation. She did recall that she had told Anders to leave her, and that he had indeed removed himself from the cellar, but she would probably still be lying there on the floor if he had not carried her here. And she doubted anyone else would have had the audacity to remove her armor. 

She lay there for a long while, until she began to see stars from the decreased airflow through the pillow. Rolling over, she heard the door click, and she raised herself on her elbows, peering out from behind ragged black hair, expecting Anders, who at the very least had not slept in their bed the night before. Instead, a familiar red head peered through the crack that appeared, and gave her a look that Marian belatedly realized likely matched her own expression: a bleary, angry scowl. 

"You look like shit," Varric stated, though not with his usual cheer. He shoved his way through the door, and closed it behind him. In his hand, he held a small glass vial with a bluish liquid. 

Hawke frowned, sitting up. The sheets fell to her waist, though she wore a clean shift beneath - another gesture of Anders', no doubt. She raked a hand through her hair, uselessly, for it fell back into her eyes, and felt as though it was twice as unruly as normal. Varric approached the bed, and as he did, he hooked a foot through a chair that stood beside the nightstand, and shoved it forward. Tossing himself into it, he jammed his feet against the mattress, one crossed over the other, and regarded Hawke. 

"How you holding up, kiddo?" he asked after a moment. 

"I'm fine," Hawke lied easily. 

Varric raised an eyebrow and gave her a dubious scowl. Rather than point out her obvious bullshit, he held out the glass vial he'd entered with. "Blondie roused me out of a perfectly good sleep this morning with instructions that I bring you this first thing. Hangover cure." 

Hawke merely stared at it, her mind working on the puzzle of Anders. "Why didn't he do it himself?" 

Varric shrugged, and wedged the vial into her unwilling fingers. "Said he was leaving for a while. Didn't know when he'd be back. And to look out for you.”

Marian simply held the vial - she'd had Anders' miracle cure administered more than once, for her propensity to overindulge, especially after fights, was rather on the side of legendary. Just this tiny amount of the blue liquid would wipe away the worst headache, restore energy, ease an upset stomach. Anders was a genius with this sort of thing. 

She wanted nothing to do with it.

More recollections of the night before hove into her sea of consciousness.  _"Just leave, Anders. Before you end up like this."_ She'd meant laid out, dead on a table, because she was too incompetent to keep him safe, and apparently he'd taken her seriously. Had she even been serious? Perhaps in part, at the time, but now the realization that he was gone clenched wretchedly in her gut and she knew it was the last thing she wanted. For him to leave her, like everyone else in her life. 

She took the vial and dropped it without concern for its delicacy on the beside table. "Where did he go?" 

Again, Varric shrugged. "I wasn't exactly awake, and he was talking too fast. You're lucky I figured out that was for you, instead of drinking it myself."

Hawke gestured at the bottle. "Have at. I have a better cure in mind." 

 She threw the covers aside and shoved her feet out, dropping to the floor. She could feel her friend's eyes on her, silent, as she located her armor. It was all laid carefully at the foot of the bed, upon the wooden chest. Someone had recovered her daggers, and cleaned them so that they shone with a bright glean. 

 Numbly, Marian began strapping the pieces on, all the while feeling Varric's eyes boring into her. At last, he spoke. 

 "Are there plans ... for your mother?" His voice was gravelly, not accustomed to weighted discussions. 

 Hawke strapped on her left gauntlet, using her teeth to tighten the straps. "Gamlen will be here this afternoon to take her. After that I don't know, and I don't want to know. I said my goodbyes." 

 "Marian," the dwarf said, and he almost never used her given name. 

 Hawke whirled on him. "What, Varric? It's not even my mother, is it? Some sick amalgamation. Just a fucking  _head._  I told him to burn it, but if he wants to ... pretend she's still an Amell, that's his business." 

 Varric's hands snapped up, placating. "Hey, it's your life." 

 She stared at him for a moment longer, then returned to the task of dressing. At last, she slipped her daggers into the crossed sheaths on her back, and moved toward the door. It was open, and she was standing in it, when she glanced back at her friend and jerked her chin toward the space beyond. 

"Time for a real curative potion," she said. "Come on." 

 -ooo-

 

One thing that could always be counted on in Lowtown, and especially the Hanged Man, was that people drank at all hours of the day and night, even the morning. As it turned out, Hawke had slept until almost noon. The walk to the bar had been beneath a leaden, gray autumn sky, and that reflected Marian’s mood perfectly. Varric had dutifully accompanied her, and wisely did not attempt to engage her in further conversation, which would have ended in chilly silence.

Hawke could not stop wondering what had become of Anders. Bodahn had known nothing of the mage’s departure, and Marian had noticed that his staff was gone, as well as a goodly portion of the meager belongings that had collected in the month he had lived with her.

That had been an interesting conversation, and one that Marian had managed to make only half honest. He’d mentioned an increase in activity by Templars in Darktown, and that they seemed only days from closing in on his clinic. Hawke knew that the men she paid to watch Anders’ back for him were compensated well enough and appropriately afraid of her that they would kill who they had to, Templars notwithstanding, but Anders didn't know that, still, and she had told him it would be safer for him at her mansion in Hightown. That was without a doubt true, but he had seemed touched for far different reasons when she gave him the key to the cellar, so that he could reach her from Darktown without walking the streets.

It had been, admittedly, a nice month, with him there. She found out he loved to talk, and often stayed up chattering until the late hours. Hawke had long suspected that, prior to Justice, he had been a very different man, and when he was relaxed, curled in bed with her and a glass of wine, that part of him returned. He had a wicked sense of humor that more than matched her own, and he easily made her laugh until her stomach hurt with tales of his misdeeds in the Circle.

There were also serious conversations, during which she’d learned what else he’d endured in the Circle. There were nightly raids into the communal quarters shared by the mages, who were kicked awake with steel toed boots, and then searched for any contraband – personal items such as letters from family or friends outside the Circle, gifts from a lover, mementos of home. It pained her to know that he’d only been allowed to keep one thing – an embroidered pillow – to remind him of his childhood, and didn’t even know if his parents yet lived. They had even stolen his name – choosing to call him by the slang term for those that matriculated from the Anderfels. But he remembered it, and he told her, and she knew that no one else in his life knew, besides her.

The most startling thing he’d related was the _entire year_ they had locked him away in a tower cell. How he had emerged from that experience sane was a marvel to her. Hawke could imagine herself in such a situation, and knew she would have climbed the walls with lack of activity, but Anders was a social creature, and likely was more so before Justice, if his tales were anything to go by. She wasn’t sure about the story he related about the possessed cat, and assumed there was a veneer of madness to it. Hawke wondered if the Templars the cat had supposedly destroyed had been Anders’ own victims. If so, it was a miracle he was alive at all. That story, perhaps more so than any other, left her burgeoning with admiration for him - for how strong he was.

She did know he had nightmares. He often woke her, mumbling in his sleep, hands twitching, sweat beading on his brow. Hawke woke him, after the first time, from a distance, because the first such incident had resulted in a very unpleasant electrical shock for which he was profoundly apologetic. He would never tell her what the dreams were about.

And now he was gone. Gone like Carver, her mother, her father, and Bethany, to whom she could not even write, and it was her fault. She’d never even managed to tell him how she felt, and it was too late.

 

Tugging the door to the Hanged Man open, she found the bar bustling, as usual, with the various characters who came here each day to do exactly what she planned to do.

Compartmentalize everything that was wrong in her life, all the loss, all the memories, all the pain, and summarily drown it.

 

-ooo-

 

And that is exactly what she did.

Anders did not return that first day, nor was he at the mansion when Hawke staggered home alone to look for him. She’d slept there that night, alone but for the company of her Mabari, and when she’d woken again the next morning, to the emptiness that Anders had added to with his absence, she vowed not to do it again.

So she became a permanent fixture at the Hanged Man. She spent the entire day following Anders’ disappearance, the second after her mother’s death, at the bar. Varric seemed to be the only one of her circle that knew better than to try to draw her out in conversation, but as irritated as it made her, Hawke endured it with as much good-nature as she could summon. The alternative was a fist in the mouth, and so she chalked it up to practice at self-control.

Aveline actually sat and had a beer with her, and imparted some words regarding the death of her own father that Hawke would likely have found to be profound if she’d been in the mood to heal, but she wasn’t. With every drink she had, she was nurturing every negative emotion that stirred in her psyche. Fear, hurt, disbelief, and above all else, anger.

Merrill was a veritable stream of condolences and offers of assistance, of every variety. “ _Come stay at my place, Hawke. I think I’ve plugged all the rat holes, but if not, maybe you could help me! Oh that’s silly of me, I’m sure you don’t want to plug rat holes right now. I could come stay with you! I can paint your nails! Are you sure you don’t want something to eat? I can order you something. I’m so sorry about your mother, Hawke. Do you want to talk about her? Where did Anders go? That’s not very nice of him to run out on you like that. Oh. Maybe I should…I’ll be… over here if you need me.”_

Isabela bought her shots, and suggested she take out her frustration in the way Isabela knew how to deal with problems (when not stabbing them in the back): in the bedroom.The thought, however, did not appeal to Marian. At least not involving anyone that was not Anders.

 

It was the evening of the second night when she finally saw Fenris. He had avoided her, and Varric had told Hawke it was because the taciturn elf didn’t know what to say to her. Indeed, that seemed to ring true, for he had been sitting beside her at the bar for more than two hours, and he had only offered a monotone apology, and then shared her silence. It was perhaps the most comforting any of her friends had managed to be, despite their efforts.

Marian sipped her beer, having lost count hours before. Because Fenris was as quiet as she, Hawke found herself listening to the conversations at the bar. One particular voice had been grating on her nerves for most of the evening, and she glared blearily at the young man, out of place in his finely tailored garb. He was about Marian’s height, with carefully parted blonde hair, a smattering of freckles, and a crooked front tooth that managed not to mar the smile that he flashed often to his companions. They were two men Hawke did not recognize, but saw from the tattoo on the neck of the one turned away from her that one was definitely Coterie. She tuned in to their conversation, allowing herself to be distracted from the darker thoughts in her own soul.

“You should have see her face!” Blonde Man was saying. “You’d have thought she’d seen a ghost!”

Coterie One laughed falsely, but dutifully. A business deal was clearly somewhere on the table. Coterie Two chimed in, though he was also facing away, and Marian didn’t hear what he said.

Blonde Man thought it was funny, however, for he tilted his head back as he chuckled. “Well, all I know is she liked what she got!”

The way he said it made Hawke’s pulse spike, and she frowned, taking another long drag of her beer. Coterie One jabbed the man for details. Fenris was watching them now as well, having noticed that Marian’s attention was drawn to the charade.

“Well,” Blonde Man was saying, “I got her up against that wall and hiked up those skirts. It was like two moons in the sky that night, that ass was so round and pale!” They all laughed uproariously at this, then Blonde Man continued. “I mean, she kept saying _NO_ but you know they never mean it! Especially not if they actually leave the bar with you!”

Things that had been boiling in Marian’s chest since her mother had died suddenly overflowed, hearing this man describing violating a woman. Whether it was true, or bravado to impress these two rougher men, Hawke suddenly didn’t care, because it was an excuse. _And she wanted one._ Fury, less at this situation than at everything that had come before it, bubbled into her throat with a taste like bile, and she slapped her half empty beer onto the bar and shoved her stool back.

Fenris’s hand came down on her wrist before she could push away from the railing. “Hawke,” he said, in that quiet, deep voice.

Marian did not reply, because her teeth were firmly ground together. Her feet were slightly unsteady beneath her, but she recovered quickly, and flashed Fenris a look that he knew well enough, because he released her wrist and sighed. He stood up as well, but leaned against the bar as Marian skirted him, coming about to face the knot of men at the corner of the bar.

Hawke shouldered past Coterie One, who grunted when jostled, and planted her elbow on the railing, instantly getting Blonde Man’s attention, for he was now facing her. She flashed him a perfect, white-toothed grin from beneath her luminous blue eyes, and the man’s expression froze with his humor, then melted into a leer.

“Well good evening there, beautiful.” Then he added to his compatriots. “You see what I mean? They just flock to me.”

“Well,” Hawke drawled, distantly sensing Fenris’ presence closer, at her back. Blonde Man didn’t seem to register the elf, who was capable of subtlety when he chose. “I just couldn’t help but overhear. I’ve always wanted to … you know … do it. Outside.”

The leer became wider. “Oh have you now? We can take care of that!” He reached out and traced Hawke’s cheek with the backs of his fingers, and she resisted a strong urge to bite them off for his trouble.

“Will it turn you on more if I say NO while you’re doing it?” she punctuated this with a demure smile, and straightened, taking a seductive step toward him.

Blonde Man looked down at her. “You’ll be screaming by the time I’m done with you, little lady!” Then he lifted a hand, shifted it forward, and grabbed Hawke’s ass, pulling her close to him so that he ground his hips into hers.

That was all it took. All she needed to let go of the self-control she had been culturing for days.

Like lightning, Hawke’s fingers were on the back of his head, tangling in his mop of blonde hair, and his face registered first surprise, then a brief moment of pleasure that faded quickly when he saw the look on her face. Before he could utter a single word of protest, Hawke stepped back, turning her body to the side, and with her considerable upper body strength, she slammed him face first into the bar. His head careened off of it, and he staggered backward, blood streaming from his nose.

He was wiping it away, pain replaced by shock and then fury. “You _bitch_ ,” he shrieked, as around them, the sounds of the tavern faded.

The two Coterie men simply backed away, wanting no part of this, for either no deal had been struck with this man, or they knew Hawke and her reputation. Or both.

“Do you even _know_ who I am?”

“Know as much as I need to,” Hawke snapped, and she swung her fist, connecting it firmly with his jaw. He stumbled, almost going down, and Hawke used the opportunity to drive her knee into his groin. With that, he hit the ground, and before she even thought about it, a dagger was in her hand.

It was not until Fenris clamped a hand on her forearm, his grip immovable and steel, did it register to Marian that she had, without a doubt, fully intended to kill this man. Simply as an excuse to satiate her rage. Fenris was pulling her arm down, fingers trailing to her wrist, where he squeezed. His thumb pricked a bundle of nerves, and with a spasm, she dropped the dagger. The elf put his other arm around her, and pulled her to him. He wound the fingers of his right hand over her own, and pressed his lips to her ear, whispering to her.

“Let’s get out of here Hawke. It’s not worth it.”

She merely stood there, trembling with unspent fury while the Blonde Man writhed in agony on the floor at her feet. Fenris was warm, solid, comforting.

“I’ll take you home,” he added softly. He held her for a moment longer until she finally relaxed in his embrace, and then he let her go. He stooped and picked up her dagger for her, then guided her away with an arm about her shoulders.

 

He walked her home that way, and Hawke was too numb to even think about what she’d done. Fenris, true to his nature, did not try to engage her on the topic, but when they reached her door, Marian turned to speak to him. The memory of his recent closeness, his stability, as well as more carnal memories, prompted words she wanted to say, but knew she would regret.

“Stay, Fenris.”

Something passed across his handsome face, and the green eyes darkened for a moment. Whether with desire, or some other feeling, Marian did not know, but he shook his head. “I will not.”

She was not the type to argue, and so they remained in her doorway, staring at one another, noses only inches apart, until Fenris finally touched her shoulder. “I will always be your friend,” he said. Then he turned and left.

Marian stood there, watching him disappear into the shadows, and then simply hovered there, staring at the shadows themselves and willing herself to simply cease to exist. To join her family on the other side, and be free of this vicious, thankless mortal coil.

At last, she shook herself from this dark trance, and repaired inside. The dwarves were not to be seen, and Marian was fine with that. Wearily, she trudged up the stairs, and only at the very edge of her consciousness did she notice that there was light, seeping warm and yellow beneath her closed bedroom door.

Entering, she immediately tensed, seeing a figure hunched in a chair by a fire that should not have been lit. Then she realized who it was – a tattered coat, those ridiculous feathered pauldrons, and she almost collapsed with a relief so unexpected that it was utterly overwhelming.

“Anders…” she whispered, more to herself than to him, but he heard her, and turned his head.

He looked exhausted, as though he had not slept since the last time she’d seen him. There were dark bruises beneath his eyes, his hair was undone and tangled, and his hands and coat were filthy.

He was beautiful.

The mage unfolded quickly from the chair, and made his way across the room. “Marian,” he said, his voice raw and tired. “I’m sorry. I couldn’t …”

“I didn’t mean I wanted you to leave,” Marian blurted out, too emotionally spent to take care with her admissions.

Anders' face registered surprise, then compassion. “I know,” he said softly. “I needed to do something…” This last word came out shrill, and he cleared his throat. “I wanted to help you…I didn’t know what else to do…” he was stumbling over the words now, and finally he just shook his head, and reached into his coat. He withdrew a small bottle, filled with some red liquid, and thrust it at her. “This was all I could think of.”

Marian stared at his face, unable to look away for a moment, then focused on the item he held out to her. Sluggishly, she took it from him, peering at it. Another potion of some sort.

“Anders…” she began, looking up with a frown. “I…”

“It’s Bethany’s phylactery,” he interjected.

Hawke’s mouth hung open upon the words she had been forming earlier, and now, as realization slowly sank in, she felt her eyes widen. “Bethany’s … Anders how…”

He gave her that smirk that belied his gloomy, tortured exterior. The irreverent rebel. “I stole it. Right out from under their collective noses.”

“From the _Gallows?_ ” The hand that held the phylactery dropped to her side, and the look she gave him was a mixture of shock and dismay that he would ever have put himself in that kind of danger.

“For you,” he added, quietly, as though he could read her mind. “It’s the only one. I got to it before they shipped it off – they’re taking longer to do it now with the Qunari clogging the docks, and with …”

He didn’t finish, because Marian stepped forward and pressed her lips to his. He caught the kiss with a muffled _umph_ , then wrapped his arms around her waist and held her tightly. It was only a hard meeting of lips, for Hawke then tucked her head into the hollow of his shoulder, where it met his neck, burying her nose behind the feathers, breathing in. He had been gone only two days, and Maker how she had missed him. Even this sweaty, unwashed, insomniac scent. Her arms were around him as well, one hand holding the key to release her sister from the grasp of the Templar order, so that they could never find her with their accursed magic. A gift of hope.

She found herself trembling again, and this time not with rage. It was a strange feeling, like deep in the well of her soul, someone had pulled a plug, and everything she’d felt for days was draining away, flooding out. She felt his arms tighten around her after a moment, and belatedly, she felt that the feathers that pressed against her face were damp. Her cheeks were damp, the muscles of her shoulders tense, quaking.

She was crying.

Marian Hawke did not cry.

Perhaps that was no longer who she was. Perhaps this man had reforged her in some way. She clung to him, and let him hold her up, and let him hear her sob like a child into his neck, until at last, there was nothing left in her soul to release. Except one thing.

She raised her head, which swam, and she scrubbed the tears away, finding she was curiously unashamed. He held her close still, but gave her room to look into his face.

“I love you,” she said, her voice hoarse.

She watched his eyes light up, and he smiled softly. “I know,” was his response. Then he touched his nose briefly to hers, and kissed her.

His lips curved into a wider smile against hers, and she found herself returning it, until she almost laughed, and drew away. She twined the fingers of one hand through his, and then shifted, her back to him, so that she faced the fire.

With one, forceful gesture, she hurled the phylactery into the fire, where it shattered into a thousand pieces, hissed as it splattered into the flames, and then went quiet.


	11. Chapter 11

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Trigger warnings for suicidal behavior in this chapter.

There was a time after Marian learned to speak, during which something abbreviated happened, something passed, that could be thought of as happiness.

Before they both burned it to the ground.

Hawke and Anders could not be separated, a fact that invited communal amusement, jesting, and mock annoyance from their friends (or real, in Fenris's case). Anders enjoyed the first sense of peace he recalled, even though it was short lived. He would lay in that opulent Hightown bed, head resting on her chest, feeling her heartbeat through her skin, and feel as though some element of power he had no control over, even as a mage, surrounded him. Some potentiality of somatic might that was like threads binding together the parts of him that even then, he felt depreciating.

She rarely smiled any more, where before she had been quick with a joke, with sunlight in her eyes even on dark days. She drank more, and Varric explored the territory of discussing it with her only to find it inhospitable. Anders himself didn't bother; but he nursed her out of her hangovers with genuine patience. If Justice would have let him hang back from his inevitable plunge from the cliff of self control by drowning his will power in alcohol, he would have. As ironic as that seemed.

They talked of many things during this time, even though none of the stories that Marian shared with him seemed like release. Giving up the illusion of safety that she had created for herself by refusing to tell Anders that she loved him seemed more like surrender. Admitting that she was powerless over this thing and no longer had the strength to fight it. She told him of her father dying, and he saw the raw hurt that she could do nothing for him – that she had no art such as Malcolm Hawke. She related the tale of being powerless to save her brother, foolish enough to charge an Orc in what Marian thought was his attempt to step out of her shadow. He hated that their father had left his family in her care, when he was the eldest son. Perhaps, she told Anders in a whisper in the dark, Carver had been right.

Everything she did after her mother died, every mission undertaken, was proportionately more dangerous. Anders sensed the simmering, festering rage in her soul that stemmed from being what she perceived as powerless, and knew that neither was it a thing that he could reason away or heal. He tried, once, to tell her that it wasn't just about her, but about the individuals that trusted her, that followed her, and was met with a tankard of ale slamming into the wall an inch from his face, soaking him in the same cold manner that her words did. _Let them stay behind then! I don't need them._

Indeed, there was an adventure into Darktown to look for a lyrium smuggler's den that had been discussed about the table and planned in detail with their small bed of refugee mercenaries that Hawke had simply walked into on her own after this conversation. She'd let Anders follow her, trailing in her long, dark shadow, because perhaps she knew there was no holding him back from her, and she'd almost gotten herself killed with her reckless mouth and lack of caution, and likely would have, if not for him.

Hawke had seen a side of him upon that occasion that had heretofore been only a story – the mental mythical image of a man who had once killed ten Templars to save himself the agony of returning to the Circle. Anders had, of course, been called to kill at her side, but for the most part, he was their healer. There was the odd ice spell that struck with more force than he intended, or a bolt of lightning that finished what someone else had started, but in his soul, he was a man who mended hurts, stitched together what was broken.

The entire event could have been avoided, settled amicably, because Hawke had another weapon that no money could buy: a reputation for being a killer. She also had a mage by her side, which every man in that dark sewer cavern recognized, and there were few enough mages walking free in Kirkwall. But Hawke had picked a fight, deliberately, and had been the first to draw a blade, ignoring Anders' one short plea of _“Marian...”_

And so he'd used his staff-blade, which he didn't even bother to keep sharp, foolishly, but he was wiry and stronger than he looked. He'd set men alight with fire and let them burn, and all the while he was choking Justice down like vomit that threatened to incapacitate him. The spirit recognized what he saw: this woman was a loose grenade, creating of herself the thing she hated most.

It was after this, after having to crouch amid a band of small time criminals, mutilated, the smell of burnt flesh filling his nostrils with nails digging into his scalp to keep Justice at bay, that he'd had to scream at her to leave him there, not knowing if he could stop the righteous fury of the spirit wound through his visceral being from turning on her to emphasize the point that she would not hear from his lips.

But she hadn't left. She'd actually challenged him, even knowing what he was fighting. She'd tossed her daggers on the ground and screamed at Justice to _“face her”_ without any regard for what it did to him. It was the first time she ever truly turned his rage on her, the first time he ever thought of simply standing up and putting a fist to her jaw to stop this madness. Instead he left her. He left her standing there surrounded by blood and death. Her mantle.

It was the beginning of the end of his restraint. Justice was boiling, a volcano, and it was when his soul truly started to burn from the inside. The Fade spirit would not let him forget that he'd let this woman drag him into her hell, stringing him along in her foray into self-destruction. Anders had fled back to his clinic that day, and tried to lose himself, to quell the sickness in his stomach, by helping those poor souls that responded to that blue light outside the door. None of them was Marian, however, when it was she that needed his help the most.

He could not make himself go to her, not because he didn't want her, or need her, but because he didn't trust himself around her. Justice began spinning his love for her, the sacrifices he'd made for her with years of killing for her, into something credible, something equitable. Anders fell asleep alone, curled in the fetal position on his hard cot, to whispers of saving her soul, of Justice murmuring that Anders needed to give her purpose, to show her a path that ameliorated the pain with something irreproachable.

That was when he started writing, so he didn't have to sleep, so he could distract himself from the voice in his head. He stopped eating; even if he'd had food, he had no appetite. He extinguished the light, and closed the door to his clinic, and he alternated for lightless days between pacing with rage and slumping against the wall in misery.

He would not have known of Marian's ultimate provocation of her inner demons, her offering of power to self-hate and anguish that would finally let the two punch through her being and take her over, if Varric hadn't come to him. She had challenged the Arishok, in single combat. A creature twice her size, a leader in a warrior caste trained since birth as a killer. Anders knew what she was doing, just as Varric did, and the mage had wrenched his frail form out of his bed, drowned his belly in lyrium, and gone after her again.

Justice let him go because he made a silent promise. One that would change everything.

Anders never told her he'd helped her that day. She would never have forgiven him for it, because he knew she wanted to die. He was forced to be more than subtle about his involvement in the fight, and her friends did not care about fair odds, and so they sheltered him as he worked his spells. He poured all his power into shielding her, into making her faster, stronger, and in repelling the Arishok. He dumped adrenaline into her system, dopamine, pushing out the rage and the anger, and no one noticed that when the Arishok died, impossibly, that a skinny, bedraggled mage collapsed in the back of the room.

Anders was not sure what Varric, or any of them, told her about his purpose there, but he was sure that the two that truly understood, the dwarf and Merrill, had lied about it. Fenris, Anders thought, probably guessed, but he remained silent on the fact probably because he would not have Hawke feel less of a warrior. What he did know for sure was that when he woke, it was with her hand on his cheek, in a bed at the Hanged Man. It was a fitting location, a fitting nomer for what he felt like.

She was no longer only Marian Hawke. She was the Champion of Kirkwall. She wore red armor the color of dried blood. Her black hair fell over her eyes as she looked down at him, her fingers brushing his own blonde locks back.

“I'm sorry Anders,” she whispered.

It was the last thing that he expected to hear from her. He only stared at her for a long moment, until she caught his hand and pressed his knuckles to her lips. A smile actually touched her lips, one that reached back into her eyes. _Ah. She was a savior now. It was what she needed. Justice was right._ Resolve for his plan, for the thing Justice told him he needed to do, began to truly take root.

“Marian..” he croaked, but she turned her attention to a cup of water on the table, and helped him sit up enough to take a sip, which he choked on and coughed for a moment.

“I've spent a lot of time … talking … to Varric. Waiting for you to wake up,” she said softly, setting the cup aside. “I see … what I've been doing.”

“Trying to kill yourself while you're torturing the healer that loves you?” he asked with a bitter, tired tone.

Her mouth tucked into a frown at that, but then she nodded shortly. “I'm sorry.”

She'd said it twice. Unapologetic, unforgiving Marian Hawke. She had one knee bent beneath her on the edge of the bed, and his hand was still in her warm grip, resting against his hip. He squeezed her fingers after a moment, absolution. What right had he to give it, at any rate? It was a steel knife in his windpipe. He was going to set the world on fire, and take her with him.

“I … need you,” she said then, and he felt his eyebrows lift. His whole body ached, especially his head. “Don't leave me again?”

It was a plea. He stared at her, into that blue gaze that shimmered in the candlelight like a dark ocean. He saw the future there, the flames, the blood, the burning road to salvation, not only for mages in Thedas, but for her. For the woman that could not live without utility, without lending her vitality to a greater purpose. Justice had planted this suggestion in his consciousness, that here was the heroine of their cause, and even now, her recent deeds had rolled back the shadows in her eyes. _She needed this. Justice was right._

“Can you promise me the same thing?” he found himself asking. _Can you promise not to leave me? After?_

She contemplated him for a long moment, her brow furrowed in a small line, dark brows tenderly set. Instead of speaking, a sudden flash of movement produced a dagger in her free hand, and it was poised over him. A flurry of adrenaline rattled through his chest, but he shoved it aside as she extricated her other hand and touched the carving of the hawk that he still wore about his neck. That he would always wear. Then she let it go, transferring the dagger to the other hand, and then pressed the tip of it into the pad of her left thumb. Several sharp, deep motions produced a shape there, and hot moisture sprang into his eyes when he saw what it was. Blood beaded then began to seep from the lines that formed the letter “A”. It was deep, and it would scar. He knew everything he needed to know about wounds.

She had not flinched at the drag of the dagger, and she regarded it for only a moment, before her eyes flicked to him, asking him her question again, silently, from beneath black lashes that turned the blue to gray. Without hesitating, he held his hand up.

He clenched his teeth as she took his offering, and the dagger slipped through the tender flesh and marked him for life, for this was one scar he would not stitch. Afterward, she set the dagger, dipped in red, on the bedside table, and wrapped her hand around his, pressing her bleeding finger into the letter “H” that was now a part of his body just as she was part of his soul.

He had his answer.

 


End file.
